Try asynchronous extraction from a Sensible URL

Use Sensible's asynchronous endpoints in production scenarios. You have two options for asynchronous processing:

  • Provide your own URLs for your documents.

  • Use URLs provided by Sensible for your documents.

This topic covers using URLs provided by Sensible. This is a good option if you can't create either publicly accessible or pre-signed URLs for your documents.

For either option, you can get the results as soon as they're ready by specifying a webhook.

Extract from a URL Sensible provides

Prerequisites

See prerequisites.

Generate the upload URL

Generate a temporary, one-time Sensible URL for a document:

  1. Copy the following code sample and replace YOUR_API_KEY with your API key:
curl --request POST 'https://api.sensible.so/v0/generate_upload_url/tax_forms' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY' \
--data '{"content_type":"application/pdf"}'
  1. In your Postman workspace, click Import, select Raw text, paste the code sample, and follow the prompts to import the code sample.

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  1. Click Send. The response looks something like the following:
{
    "id": "14d82783-c12b-4e70-b0ae-ca1ce35a9836",
    "created": "2021-06-16T16:22:56.576Z",
    "status": "WAITING",
    "type": "tax_forms",
    "upload_url": "https://sensible-so-utility-bucket-prod-us-west-2.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/EXTRACTION_UPLOAD/sensible/fc3484c5-3f35-4129-bb29-0ad1291ee9f8/EXTRACTION/14d82783-c12b-4e70-b0ae-ca1ce35a9836.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=REDACTED&Expires=1623861476&Signature=REDACTED&x-amz-security-token=REDACTED"
}

Extract the data

Use the one-time URL you generated in the previous step to extract data from the document:

  1. Copy the following code sample. Replace YOUR_UPLOAD_URL with the upload_url that you received as a response in the previous steps:
curl --request PUT 'YOUR_UPLOAD_URL' \
--data-binary '@/PATH_TO_DOWNLOADED_DOCUMENT.pdf' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/pdf' \
  1. In your Postman workspace, click Import, select Raw text, paste the code sample, and follow the prompts to import to code sample.

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Troubleshoot: Postman can automatically add authorization and content-type headers that cause errors:

  • If Postman automatically specifies authorization for the request, then specify No Auth in the request's Auth tab :

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  • If Postman automatically specifies a content type header, then ensure that the value of the Content-Type header matches that of the content_type body parameter in the request in step 1. In this case, it must be application/pdf.

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  1. If you haven't already, download the following example document, which works with the example tax_forms document type you created in the Prerequisites section:
Example documentDownload link
  1. Correct the path to the downloaded document in your request: click the Body tab, select binary, then click Select file and select the document:

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  1. Click Send to send the request. The response is 200:

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Retrieve extraction

To retrieve the document extraction, you have two options:

  • Use the /documents endpoint. See the following steps.
  • Use a webhook. See Try a webhook.

To retrieve the extraction results with the /documents endpoint, take the following steps:

  1. In a previous step on this page, you generated a URL and got back a response that included an extraction ID:

    {
        "id": "14d82783-c12b-4e70-b0ae-ca1ce35a9836"
    }
    
  2. Copy the document extraction id from that response.

  3. Copy the following code sample and replace YOUR_EXTRACTION_ID and YOUR_API_KEY:

curl --request GET 'https://api.sensible.so/v0/documents/YOUR_EXTRACTION_ID' \
--header 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY'
  1. In your Postman workspace, click Import, select Raw text, paste the code sample, and follow the prompts to import to code sample.

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  1. Click Send. The response includes a parsed_document object that looks something like the following:
{
	"parsed_document": {
		"year": {
			"type": "string",
			"value": "2021"
		},
		"filing_status.single": {
			"type": "boolean",
			"value": true
		},
		"filing_status.married_filing_jointly": {
			"type": "boolean",
			"value": false
		},
		"filing_status.married_filing_separately": {
			"type": "boolean",
			"value": false
		},
		"filing_status.head_of_household": {
			"type": "boolean",
			"value": false
		},
		"filing_status.qualifying_widow": {
			"type": "boolean",
			"value": false
		},
		"name": {
			"type": "string",
			"value": "Connor Roy"
		},
		"ssn": {
			"type": "string",
			"value": "337-18-2333"
		}
	}
}