API news & updates

The Plugin SDK now offers the delegateNewWindowsToFront utility function. This function allows you to capture link events that open in a new window and handle them through Front. This function replaces the deprecated delegateAnchorClicksToFront function.

You can now use token instrospection to specify an application channel’s name and address.Token introspection is an additional step in the OAuth2 flow where the client sends a request to the external server to retrieve information about the provided access token. This request allows Front to obtain details of the channel from the external service. Read more on our Developer Portal!

The Update conversation endpoint now correctly updates conversation statuses in personal inboxes. Before the update, the status update would only be applied at the team-level. The status update did not affect private conversations or propagate to the conversation assignee.From now on, the conversation status update will follow the behavior of our rule engine: the status update will be applied to the conversation assignee and owners for private conversations in addition to the shared inbox at the workspace level. This update will gradually be released to all customers over the next week. Please comment below if you want to access it immediately. PS: The update only impacts the conversation status for assignee and private conversation owners. It does not impact the status of the conversation for its followers (participants who are not the assignee or owner of the

We are excited to announce that you can now manage teammate groups via the Core API! Teammate groups allow you to create centralized lists of users that make it easier to manage shared inbox and contact access. We’ve added 14 endpoints to help you fetch, create, update, and delete teammate groups or related access like inboxes or teammates within the group. Some example endpoints include:List teammate groups Create teammate group Add teammate group team inboxes Add teammate group teammates

We are pleased to announce that the Core API now supports:Updating comments via the API—Using the comment ID, you can update the body or the pinned status of the comment. Controlling whether a comment is pinned in the conversation—A pinned comment is displayed in the pinned comments link within the conversation UI. You can mark a comment as pinned via the API using the new is_pinned field, which is available when adding or updating a comment and in all comment responses. Let us know if you have any feedback in the comments below, no pun intended.

On July 22, 2024, Google released a blog post indicating that regulators may allow the continued use of third-party cookies if users opt into them. If this turns out to be the case, it will still be important to provide alternatives to third-party cookies for those users who do not consent to the use of third-party cookies, as noted in our original post. However, Google continuing to support third-party cookies would allow you to keep using these cookies in Front plugins if you have control over the browser decisions of your users (if all your plugin users belong to your company, for example).

Highway Integration Enhancements: New "spoof warning" workflow and cleaner dynamic object variables If you had configured the Highway dynamic object configuration per our tutorial prior to May 31st, 2024, then the configuration contained errors that could lead to false positives for the fraud use case described in the tutorial. It also did not include the spoof warning property from the Highway API. Our tutorial now reflects the correct setup, and we’ve created a migration guide to make it easier to know exactly what changes to make (limited only to the fraud use case). When you complete the changes,

On September 1st 2024, we will be introducing E.164 phone number normalization to the Front API to address issues caused by inconsistent phone number handles attached to contacts. Phone number handles for contacts in Front can be created via the API, the Front contacts manager, incoming messages in channels, CRM contact syncs, and CSV import of contacts. With so many different ways of creating contacts and storing phone numbers for those contacts, it’s important to normalize the data because the different input formats can lead to duplicate contacts and related search issues. To prepare for this change, make sure your API requests (including those made through the Zapier integration) are sending valid phone numbers with the country code included. Country codes must be preceded by a plus (+) sign. Read the “Potential impacts” section below

Based on recent developments, we’ve updated our original post on handling Chrome’s third-party cookie deprecation to note the following:Google has postponed the deprecation to Q1 2025 (originally Q3 2024) We now also recommend the Storage Access API as a viable solution to handling the deprecation, in addition to CHIPS. More details in the original post. We’ve linked to an example of handling partitioned cookies in Next.js for a Google Sign In authentication flow.

Due to breaking changes in Postman, the Postman collections previously supplied in our Developer Portal can no longer push changes to forks. To obtain the latest Postman collections of our Core API and Channel API, create new forks from the following links:Core API collection Channel API collection These forks should be able to pull changes as expected whenever we update the source collection. Thanks for being part of our Front developer community!

Dynamic objects are now integrated with rules. This means that you can use Front’s powerful rule system to customize when and how dynamic objects apply to your workflows.  IMPORTANTRules have been auto-generated for all existing dynamic object configurations. These auto-generated rules have been named Create dynamic objects. While you are welcome to edit these rules, please note that disabling or deleting these rules will stop the associated dynamic objects from working.   Where to manage dynamic object rulesYou can manage existing dynamic object rules from Settings > Company name / Workspace name > Rules. As noted in the above callout, dynamic objects that you created prior to

You can now sort messages returned by the List conversation messages endpoint by their creation date.The endpoint now includes the query parameters sort_by and sort_order. Set sort_by to created_at, and then specify whether you want the sort_order to return messages as asc (oldest first) or desc (newest first) results.

Important update: Google will continue to support third-party cookies. It is still important to provide alternatives to third-party cookies for those users who do not consent to the use of third-party cookies, as noted in the rest of this article. However, Google continuing to support third-party cookies allows you to continue using these cookies in Front plugins if you have control over the browser decisions of your users (if all your plugin users belong to your company, for example). There is no longer a planned deprecation. The rest of this topic is left for historical context, but please note it is outdated.********************************************************************************************************** In a significant move towards enhancing user privacy, major web browsers are on a trajectory to deprecate support for third-party cookies to lim

We are making a breaking change to the Create a new analytics export endpoint offered by our Core API. The endpoint will now require you to specify the columns that will be present in the export. Previously, the endpoint generated an export that included all available columns. In addition, three columns will be deprecated from the export: Resolution time, Replies to resolve, and Final resolution. You should use Total reply time, Replies to resolution, and Stage resolution time instead. Why are we making these changes?We are making these changes for the following reasons:By explicitly

Between Sunday 2023-01-07 0800 UTC and Sunday 2023-01-07 0900 UTC, customers in our us-west-1 data center region may experience a disruption to the following features:* Full text search* Contacts manager* Autosuggest in the composer including: recipients, tags, inboxes, and teammates* Certain parts of the settings UI including: search, teammates, inboxes, channels, rules, views, tags, time off and shifts* Conversation audit trailThis is due to planned maintenance work required on a core database service.What is the impact?During the window, parts of the app experience will be degraded or unavailable. The display of new messages in search, events in search, and autosuggest resources in search will be delayed.Why are we doing this?One of our core database clusters needs to be restarted during the maintenance window while we perform an import

Between Sunday 2023-12-31 0200 UTC and Sunday 2023-12-31 0300 UTC, customers in our eu-west-1 data center region may experience a disruption to the following features:* Full text search* Contacts manager* Autosuggest in the composer including: recipients, tags, inboxes, and teammates* Certain parts of the settings UI including: search, teammates, inboxes, channels, rules, views, tags, time off and shifts* Conversation audit trailThis is due to planned maintenance work required on a core database service.What is the impact?During the window, parts of the app experience will be degraded or unavailable. The display of new messages in search, events in search, and autosuggest resources in search will be delayed.Why are we doing this?One of our core database clusters needs to be restarted during the maintenance window while we

Between Sunday 2023-12-31 0800 UTC and Sunday 2023-12-31 0900 UTC, customers in our us-west-2 data center region may experience a disruption to the following features:* Full text search* Contacts manager* Autosuggest in the composer including: recipients, tags, inboxes, and teammates* Certain parts of the settings UI including: search, teammates, inboxes, channels, rules, views, tags, time off and shifts* Conversation audit trailThis is due to planned maintenance work required on a core database service.What is the impact?During the window, parts of the app experience will be degraded or unavailable. The display of new messages in search, events in search, and autosuggest resources in search will be delayed.Why are we doing this?One of our core database clusters needs to be restarted during the maintenance window while we

We are excited to announce the release of sample code that demonstrates how to augment dynamic objects with information fetched from a server or API. The code also demonstrates how to verify that requests to the server are coming from Front.  We hope this code is useful and results in more powerful dynamic object use cases for customers!

The Fetch an analytics export endpoint now enforces a maximum of 5,120,000 events or messages within a single export. If your export exceeds this number, the API will return a response with the status parameter set to too_big. To address this scenario, reduce the time period of the export and fetch it again.

Between Sunday 2023-11-19 0800 UTC and Sunday 2023-11-19 0900 UTC, customers in our us-west-1 data center region may experience an interruption to loading conversations, loading conversation lists, and reopening conversations from an integration. This is due to planned maintenance work required on a core database service. What is the impact?During the window, the conversations viewing experience will be degraded or unavailable. The display of new messages, counter updates of all workspaces, and some asynchronous conversation mass-actions will be delayed. Developers trying to use the API via integrations may receive a 503 "service unavailable" error in their list conversations responses during the interruption. This should be resolved once the maintenance is complete. Why are we doing this?One of our core database clusters needs to be restarted during

Between Sunday 2023-11-12 0200 UTC and Sunday 2023-11-12 0300 UTC, customers in our eu-west-1 data center region may experience an interruption to loading conversations, loading conversation lists, and reopening conversations from an integration. This is due to planned maintenance work required on a core database service. What is the impact?During the window, the conversations viewing experience will be degraded or unavailable. The display of new messages, counter updates of all workspaces, and some asynchronous conversation mass-actions will be delayed. Developers trying to use the API via integrations may receive a 503 "service unavailable" error in their list conversations responses during the interruption. This should be resolved once the maintenance is complete. Why are we doing this?One of our core database clusters needs to be

We now offer a sample application that demonstrates how to export conversations and messages from Front! The application demonstrates: Listing all inboxes Searching for conversations Applying filters to the conversation search Handling pagination of results from the Core API Export all conversations with messages and attachments included Applying rate limit handlers Check out the application and GitHub source code on our Developer Portal.

Custom Fields in the Core APIThe Core API now exposes endpoints to list the custom fields that can be used on different resources:Use GET /accounts/custom_fields to list the custom fields available on an Account (docs). Use GET /contacts/custom_fields to list the custom fields available on a Contact (docs).Use GET /conversations/custom_fields to list the custom fields available on a Conversation (docs). Use GET /inboxes/custom_fields  to list the custom fields available on an Inbox (

Between Sunday 2023-10-22 0700 UTC and Sunday 2023-10-22 0800 UTC, customers in our us-west-2 data center region may experience an interruption to loading conversations, loading conversation lists, and reopening conversations from an integration. This is due to planned maintenance work required on a core database service. What is the impact?During the window, the conversations viewing experience will be degraded or unavailable. The display of new messages, counter updates of all workspaces, and some asynchronous conversation mass-actions will be delayed. Develo

 We just launched a new sample plugin application on the Developer Portal that demonstrates how to use the Plugin SDK to load data from an external system of record and display it to the Front user. The plugin provides advanced interactivity, allowing the Front user to reply to conversations with contextual data or attach documents from the external system to the draft. In our example, we mock a Transportation Management System (TMS) that might be used by a logistics company to manage data about transactions or shipments. Check out a video overview  The sample pl