Developer Q&A

Hello, I’m looking to build a plugin for Front. The concern I have is about security. The recommended pattern to use token verification is embed the “secret” in the search param rather than a header.Is there a way to embed the token in the header of the request instead so that it’s not obvious from the url?https://dev.frontapp.com/docs/security#token-verification

We have developed a custom app for Front to display insights, and we would like to store the app's configuration directly within the app settings for ease of access and management. Could you please guide us on the following points:Is it possible to store custom configuration data within the app settings in Front? If yes, what is the recommended approach or API to achieve this? Are there any limitations or best practices we should consider while implementing this functionality?Your assistance would be greatly appreciated, as it will help us optimize our app and ensure a seamless user experience.Looking forward to your guidance.

Our Front workflow involves generating emails and scheduling their sends on a daily basis. Our current flow is:Generate the email text and attachments programmatically. The email content includes a blurb about the time the email should be scheduled (roughly based on the local time of the recipient) Send a POST to `/drafts` with the email content and attachments On success, open the link to the draft Manually schedule the send according the the email content’s scheduled send blurb, and delete the blurb in the email.The only manual part of this flow is that we need to manually schedule the send (and delete the blurb saying the send time, but that’s a byproduct), which is a hassle. I haven’t been able to find a way to programmatically schedule sending via the API but that would allow us to do this whole flow programmatically. It doesn’t look like there’s anything in the Messages or Drafts APIs. Does this functio

Is it possible to separate comments, whether from an original comments or from two merged conversations?

I face a very weird situation when trying to convert the message.created_at to the timestamp. Firstly, my understanding is that the date type for the created_at is float. Is that correct? So the number is the seconds passed since epic, and fraction is the millisconds. Did I understand it correctly? Then I used the following code to turn it into Java Date object.new java.util.Date(TimeUnit.SECONDS.toMillis((long

We are facing a problem whenever the client disable the app fro app store from as shown in attachment. And then when reenable that app and then try to obtain oauth (access token) via api using existing refresh token within the period of 6 months i.e still refresh token is valid, api provide response {"error":"invalid_grant","error_description":"Invalid refresh token"} 

I have a few questions about the chat widget:Is it possible to swap out the current icon for one of our own? Is it possible to have customize the icon and have the ability to show/hide, move the chat bubble around or only show it on specific pages?Thank you!

Team is receiving a draft failure error when trying to send emails?Only one of my gmail channels is having this issue, other gmail channels are not having this. And this channel is working fine on its own. I can send emails in this gmail but in Front I can’t. 

Hey everyone, I'm working on setting up an Application Channel to connect to my backend for sending and receiving messages. I'm trying to understand the setup(using the template to help understand), but it feels like the guide leaves out some key details. Here are a few questions I have:When configuring the Channel Type in my app, what exactly is the difference between ‘Contact Types’ (Email, Phone, Custom)? When adding the channel to my workspace, it asks for a token. What value should this be for the template to work correctly?   This might relate to question 2, but every time I add the new channel, I immediately get an error that says, “Our access to this account was revoked. New messages will not be imported until you reauthorize,” with a “Reautho

I am unable to add a Channel as the app states I have reached my limit, but in the attached image you will observe that I have no Channels. What am I doing wrong?   

The documentation mentions that React is not needed, but there aren’t any examples of subscribing to context events without using React, so I’m hoping you can point me in the right direction.Is there a simple way to use the sdk without React for sidebar plugins? Preferably, a way to include a script directly on a page (without a build step) and then subscribe to events.Something similar to this would be great:<script type="text/javascript" src="https://dl.frontapp.com/libs/frontjs.min.js"></script><script>Front.contextUpdates.subscribe(context => { switch(context.type) { case 'noConversation': console.log('No conversation selected'); break; case 'singleConversation': console.log('Selected conversation:', context.conversation); break; case 'multiConversations': console.log('Multiple conversations selected', contex

Hi, we setup the webhook to receive inbound events. We also have rules on Front to tag each conversation based on its channel. The rules work well on tagging.However, we have some hiccups on the webhook. In the ideal case, once there is a new conversation, the rule tags the message, our webhook receive the inbound events about the message and the event comes with tag list, so we can route it to proper processors. However, we sometimes receive the inbound events with empty tag lists, therefore I cannot do the proper routing for the next step. It appears the tagging happened after Front server send out the event to our webhook.Anybody knows how to fix this?

Hello, I am assessing whether Front will work for my business use case. I need to use a number of Twilio WhatsApp channels for my clients all of which are Business accounts. Business accounts have some limitations around messaging and messaging windows and as a result need to use pre-cleared message templates when sending messages to users outside of a conversation window. Does Front support sending Twilio message templates via the Front API?Additionally does Front support web hooks for listening to messages (both inbound and outbound messages to the channels?Thanks!

I am looking to setup on Front to allow agents to view conversations happening in WhatsApp Business accounts that I manage as well as handle quick questions with my API so that agents do not need to handle those types of questions. I have already added the channel but am confused as to how to send messages to users via Front or if I should be sending messages via the Twilio SDK and Front will just sync with Twilio through the channel. Usually platforms like Front have a webhook that I have to plugin to my WhatsApp sender in twilio but that documentation/requirement does not seem to be present for Front? 

I am looking to retrieve the First Reply Time for messages via the Analytics API. Maybe I am missing something, but this doesn’t seem to be available in the .csv downloaded. Is there a way to pull this metric via the API?

I created a Telegram bot, linked to my inboxes, and I’m developping a custom integration to send advanced Telegram messages, how can I get the chat_id of this conversation (Telegram-one), so my integrated plugin can retreive it on the current/opened conversation?I managed to get the @username, I have my Telegram bot tokens, but no way to get the chat_id.

I want to send an email using the frontapp api. When the recipient of that email reply to that email, I want him to send that reply email to someone else. How to I set that Reply-to property when I create an email in front? This is the email header I want to set a value for: https://www.getresponse.com/help/reply-to-field.html

Love all the new chatbot features - but when using chatbot a message is automatically hovering over the chat widget - is there a way not to have that and only have the chatbot start when a user actually opens the chat? It is quite annoying for customers to have a big bubble showing if they have no intention of chatting.  

We want our application to be used as public. That's why we filled out your form and sent it, but we haven't received a response from you for a long time. https://app.frontapp.com/oauth/authorizeWe do not want to receive this warning during authorize. We would be happy if you could help us. 

I’m currently using the custom channel API to send messages into a channel. When replies are made, we get a call on the outbound endpoint. I would like further clarification on what the recipients array is supposed to represent in the payload of that outbound call. It looks like there can be two recipients, with roles “from” and “to”. If I want the user handle of the original message that started the conversation, is it reliable to pull the recipient with role = “to”? Or is that meant to represent something else? Thanks!Kevin 

Good morning,When using front’s chat widget, the size of the close button is very small making it difficult to close when on mobile. This is particularly bad because if you miss the `x` button it opens up front chat.Is it possible to change the size, maybe by passing an option to `window.FrontChat("init", { … }` or by styling with css? Thanks,Scott attached below - a screenshot of the small `x`: 

If we’re using api tokens, what’s the preferred way to handle different environments like staging and production? I would want to ideally create separate tokens based on what data they can access, but it looks like access control is not that granular. If I create a token with “shared resources” access, it basically gives access to everything that is shared. Should we be creating a different workspace instead?

Hello, I want to download a message (email) as msg file-type via Core API. It’s possible?

Hi! I have a few questions/comments: Is there a way to export Front contacts just from individual Lists or Accounts, rather than the entire contact list only?  Can Front’s AI suggest changes to contact details, such as:When the contact name format is "Last name, First name" and switch them around Suggest the job title in a signature as their description Suggest the phone number in a signature as phone (and allow extensions)From Front’s API, getting contact details returns "handles" which is a list of all emails and phone numbers in one field. It would be great to get emails and phone numbers separately—even better if there was a "primary" email address.Thanks for the help! 

We want to use channels to support facilitating messaging in our app. At first, it looks like custom channels could work pretty well. The only issue is that when a message is first created by the “Receive custom messages” endpoint, we can’t immediately follow up with a query to get the message and conversation id because the message creation is apparently asynchronous. That would make our implementation more complex because we would have to retain the body of the message on our side in order to play back what was sent by the user while we wait for the message to completely flow through Front’s system. Would this be any different if we used application channels instead of custom channels- is the message creation also async when using the “Sync inbound message” API? Thanks!