Hey everyone, I’ve run into a really strange issue with the GetRESTProxy action in Studio when trying to parse a JSON response.
- I am making a POST request to a custom internal endpoint that returns a simple JSON object with a nested status field.
- The action succeeds with a 200 OK, but when I try to ASSIGN the response body to a string variable, it comes back as null.
- I have verified the Content-Type header is set to application/json and the endpoint works fine in Postman.
- Here is the snippet configuration I am using:
Action: GetRESTProxy
Method: POST
URL: https://internal.api.example.com/status
Headers: Content-Type: application/json
Body: {"check": true}
- Why is the response body null even though the HTTP status is 200?
The quickest way to solve this is to explicitly cast the response body to a string using ToString() in your Data Action mapping, as Studio sometimes fails to auto-deserialize nested JSON objects correctly.
ToString(GetRESTProxy.Response.Body)
Yep, this is a known issue… especially when dealing with high-volume interaction streams where the proxy action might return a raw buffer instead of a parsed object. While casting to string is a quick fix, it often leaves you with escaped quotes that break downstream JSON parsing. In my SLA monitoring integrations, I usually bypass the Studio proxy entirely for complex payloads and use a Genesys Cloud Analytics Alert to trigger a webhook instead. This allows us to handle the payload in a Node.js service where we can explicitly parse the JSON and manage retries. If you must stay in Studio, ensure your internal endpoint returns a simple JSON string without extra whitespace, as the internal deserializer is strict. You can test this by logging the raw response body to a debug variable before the assignment. If it looks like [object Object], the issue is likely in the response header Content-Type not being exactly application/json; charset=utf-8. I recommend adding a Data Action to log the full response headers to verify the MIME type matches exactly.
The main issue here is that you are ignoring the underlying transport layer. studio’s getrestproxy is a http/1.1 wrapper. it buffers. if your endpoint holds the connection open or returns a chunked transfer encoding, the proxy might timeout or return an empty buffer before the full payload arrives. casting to string is a band-aid. you are masking a potential race condition or incomplete stream read.
check the response headers in the studio trace. look for transfer-encoding. if it is chunked, studio often fails to aggregate. instead of fighting the proxy, use the notification api websocket. it handles streaming json natively.
// example of a robust websocket subscription for streaming data
const ws = new WebSocket('wss://api.mypurecloud.com/api/v2/analytics/conversations/events', [], {
headers: { 'Authorization': `Bearer ${token}` }
});
ws.on('message', (data) => {
// parse stream directly, no buffering issues
const msg = JSON.parse(data);
console.log(msg.data);
});
stop using http proxies for streaming data. it is fragile.
The problem is that studio’s getrestproxy buffers the stream, so chunked responses often result in null bodies. check the response headers for transfer-encoding: chunked. if present, switch to a webhook pattern instead.