Create work order and assign technician in single API call?

Question

Hey folks — working on an integration where we're creating work orders from an external scheduling system. Right now I'm making two calls: POST to /work_orders to create, then PATCH to update the assignee_id . 
 Wondering if there's a way to do this in one shot? I tried including assignee_id in the POST body but got a 422 with "assignee cannot be set during creation." 
 Is this a hard limitation or am I missing something in the payload structure? Would be nice to cut the round-trip latency here. 
 cc similar OAuth question for context on how I'm authenticating these calls.

Eli Torres (Staff) · Accepted Answer

Hey Devon — yeah this trips people up. The short answer is Leo's right: standard POST doesn't support it, but the bulk endpoint does let you bundle operations. 
 Here's what that looks like: 
 POST /v1/work_orders/bulk
{
 "operations": [
 {
 "method": "POST",
 "path": "/work_orders",
 "body": {
 "title": "HVAC Maintenance",
 "customer_id": "cust_abc123"
 }
 },
 {
 "method": "PATCH",
 "path": "/work_orders/{id_from_first_response}",
 "body": {
 "assignee_id": "usr_def456"
 }
 }
 ]
} 
 It's technically still two operations, but single HTTP round-trip. The responses come back in order so you can correlate. 
 Heads up: bulk endpoint has different rate limits — 10 ops per request, 100 requests/minute vs the standard 1000/min for individual calls. YMMV depending on your volume. 
 There's also a webhook work_order.created you could listen for and assign reactively, but that adds complexity vs. just accepting the two-step flow. 
 I've flagged this with the API team — nested resource creation on POST comes up a lot. No committed timeline but it's on the radar.

Leo Nakamura · Answer

Current API behavior: assignee_id is ignored on POST. Required fields for creation: title , customer_id . 
 
 Workaround: POST then PATCH (your current approach) 
 Alternative: Use /work_orders/bulk endpoint — supports nested operations 
 
 Required fields reference 
 Known limitation tracked internally. No ETA.

Carlos Vega · Answer

// Another approach — async assignment via webhook handler
// We do this for ~5k jobs/day, works fine

app.post('/webhooks/work_order.created', async (req, res) => {
 const { work_order_id } = req.body;
 const assignee = await calculateAssignee(work_order_id);
 await fp.patch(`/work_orders/${work_order_id}`, { assignee_id: assignee });
 res.sendStatus(200);
}); 
 Latency is higher but you get to implement your own assignment logic. We found the 200ms extra per job worth it for load balancing across techs.