How to access event.created_at in a webhook payload when journey is triggered by email_opened

[ivfarias]

I’m trying to build a journey that sends user and event data to an external webhook to classify users by how recently they interacted.

Here’s the setup:
• Trigger: email_opened event
• Step: Webhook call to an external Worker
• Goal: Send user.creation_date and the created_at timestamp of the email_opened event

Problem:

In the webhook body template, I tried this:

{ "email": "{{ user.email }}", "external_id": "{{ user.external_id }}", "creation_date": "{{ user.creation_date }}", "last_email_open_at": "{{ event.created_at }}" }

But when previewing or running the journey, event.created_at is coming through as undefined. I also tried using a variable step before the webhook to store the event in journey.last_open, and then referencing {{ journey.last_open.created_at }}, but that didn’t work either.

The docs say that event is available when the journey is triggered by an event, which is the case here. Still, the object is either empty or the created_at field is not accessible.

Questions:
1. Is event.created_at supposed to be available inside a webhook node when the journey is triggered by email_opened?
2. If not, what’s the best way to capture that timestamp and send it to an external webhook?
3. Is there a known limitation with using event or storing event into a variable like journey.last_open for later use?

Any insights would be helpful. Thanks.

[pushchris]

By and large event data (as accessed via the event key) is not available inside of action steps themselves since its almost impossible to know what event you are referring to (as a journey progresses there could be hundreds of events that are being referenced in different places). It's mostly only available in rules since in those situations it's comparing against anything that matches. Entrance events however are saved as the journey data for that given step so for your example, as long as the "trigger" is a journey entrance you should be able to get to the date you are looking for by using: journey.entrance_data_key.event.created_at

[ivfarias]

Thanks a lot. That helped.

By the way, it isn't currently possible to create rules based on dynamic dates, like X days ago, right?

I couldn't figure that out so I ended up creating a separate service to calculate the date via webhook, but it seems a bit of an overkill.

[pushchris]

The next major version release includes them (currently in alpha, wouldn't recommend using yet). In the current production release for rules inside of journeys you can get pretty close by using Handlebars date math and date comparison