Working with Conversations

You'll create a new Conversation using the Conversation creation (JS, iOS) or Conversation Builder methods on your new initialized Client object. Optionally, you can pass in the following parameters:attributes, friendlyName, and uniqueName.

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/* Creating Conversation */
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// create new conversation, all the parameters are optional
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await client.createConversation({
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    attributes: {},
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    friendlyName: "new conversation",
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    uniqueName: "new conversation",
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});

After creating the Conversation, you'll need to join it to participate. Joining will create a Participant object in the Conversation that is associated with your User. This also subscribes you to events from the Conversation.

If you'd like to stop receiving events from this Conversation and remove your Participant, you can call the appropriate method to leave the Conversation.

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//join the Conversation
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await conversation.join();
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//leave the Conversation
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await conversation.leave();

There are two types of Participants:

• Chat (SDK-based) Participants, or
• Non-chat (e.g. SMS, WhatsApp) Participant

SDK-based (chat) Participant objects have a many-to-one relationship with User objects. A User represents a human using the SDK, and that User can be associated with multiple Participant objects: a unique Participant object for each Conversation they are participating in. In contrast, non-chat Participants (i.e. SMS, WhatsApp, etc.) are not linked by a User object even when they are the same human participating in multiple Conversations.

Users are uniquely identified by the identity property in the Access Token they initialized their Client with. You can create a Chat Participant belonging to that User in the Conversation by specifying their User's identity in the corresponding creation method.

To add a non-chat Participant to the Conversation, you'll have to pass the proxyAddress and address parameters to the specific creation method on the Conversation object. The proxyAddress parameter is a Twilio address (e.g. Twilio phone number, WhatsApp sender) and the address parameter is the real-world phone number or address that the non-chat Participant is using.

The following code sample shows how to add both chat and non-chat Participants to a conversation.

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/* Adding Participants (chat and non-chat) */
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// add chat participant to the conversation by its identity
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await conversation.add("identity");
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// add a non-chat participant to the conversation
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const proxyAddress = "+11222333";
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const address = "+12345678";
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await conversation.addNonChatParticipant(proxyAddress, address);
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// adds yourself as a conversations sdk user to this conversation
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// use after creating the conversation from the SDK
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await conversation.join();
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conversation.on("participantJoined", (participant) => {
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    // fired when a participant has joined the conversation
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});

You can get the list of all Participants within the Conversation by invoking the corresponding method on the Conversation object.

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/* Get participants of the conversation */
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let participants = await conversation.getParticipants();

To list the latest messages of a Conversation, call the appropriate method on the Conversation object and optionally specify the index of a specific Message to start from.

There are a few options, you can review the auto-generated documentation to familiarize yourself with the parameters you can use to modify this behavior.

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/* get the latest messages of the conversation. optional arguments:
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  pageSize | 30,
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  anchor | "end",
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  direction | "backwards"
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 */
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// get the messages paginator the latest 30 messages
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let messagesPaginator = await conversation.getMessages(30, 0, "backwards");
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// get messages
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const messages = messagesPaginator.items;

Because all Conversations are private, listing Conversations will only return Conversations that you are participating in. Call the appropriate method to retrieve them.

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// get the conversations paginator
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let conversationsPaginator = await client.getSubscribedConversations();
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// get conversations
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const conversations = conversationsPaginator.items;

Well done! You've just learned how to create your first Conversation, add a Participant and list your conversations. To learn more, check out these helpful links:

• Learn How to Send Text and Media Messageswith Conversations
• Check out the User Reachability Indicator guide