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Box Skills are designed to allow custom processing of files uploaded to Box, with the intent of enhancing the underlying metadata of the file. The benefit towards this system is that it permits the storage of rich information about any files, which may then be used to automated tasks and future processes. The end-to-end process of a Skills application is as follows.
  1. Setup up an app - Create a Custom Skills Box application that listens for files being uploaded within the entire enterprise or one or more folders.
  2. Configure the invocation_url - After creating the Custom Skills app, an invocation_url will need to be configured. This URL will be called every time a new file is uploaded to Box.
  3. Parse the event payload - When a file is uploaded, copied, or moved into a folder that the Box Skill listens to, an event payload is sent to the invocation_url. This payload contains two Access Tokens that can be used to access the uploaded file in Box and store metadata back onto the file.
  4. Verify Key Signatures - Before the service that handles the Skill payload does other actions, it should verify the invocation_url was called by Box. See the link for examples of doing this manually or using the SDKs.
  5. Send the file for processing - The service that handles the Skill payload sends the file URL or file content to an external service for processing. This service can be a third party machine learning system, or an in-house service.
  6. Store the metadata on the file - Once the processing service has extracted the metadata for the file, those insights can be stored back on the uploaded file as custom metadata.
To simplify your integration with Box Skills, a Skills Kit has been made available to obfuscate many complexities of the above steps. The Skills Kit is currently only available in Node.