Developer Q&A

I installed Front Chat on my website today, which is great so far, except that it’s exceptionally noisy in the developer console. It announces itself, it announces it’s using something called bugsnap, it spews out a load of SameSite and Partitioned cookie warnings, a few debugging messages from Ably, tells me about “frontChatChannelToken”.All of this makes real warnings a lot harder to see. What’s going on here? Can I switch off the non-cookie debug messages at all? Is there a “I’m in Production, WTF” flag I can switch on?

Hello, We have an active integration for pushing messages into Front and we are trying to wrap up a webhook to receive incoming messages from Front. We have a few questions. 1. The Authorization.Id that is coming through in the request doesn't mean anything to us at the moment. It’s not clear how this is created or where it comes from. We did see; however, that the Payload.Conversation.Assignee.Id is the same value we are already storing on our side when setting up the Integration to send messages. This looks like an easy way for us to identify who the message is for. Will this value always be populated when we're getting messages in the webhook or is it possible to get a message without an Assignee? 2. The attachment object in the payload does not contain any byte or steam data but it does have a URL. When we go to this URL we get an unauthorized response. Is there another API endpoint we should be using to access Front Attachments we receive in the Incoming Message payload? 3. Part o

Hello,We are currently building an integration with Front that will utilize Webhooks. In the “Verifying Integrity” portion of the setup on step 4 it states to “Apply the hmac SHA256 algorithm using the token provided during webhook configuration as the key [output in base 64].”Where do we get this token? The basic information tab only lists the App UID and App Secret while the OAuth tab only lists the Client ID and Client Secret. Are one of these to be used as the token or does it come from somewhere else.Second, it also says to use the raw request body. I was hoping to confirm what the expected value of the raw request body should look like. "{\"type\": \"sync\",\"authorization\": {\"id\": \"cmp_abc\"}}”or {\u0022type\u0022: \u0022sync\u0022,\u0022authorization\u0022: {\u0022id\u0022: \u0022cmp_abc\u0022}} Thanks!

Is there a way to automatically extract addresses (e.g. from signatures) for Accounts In Front? Rght now we do this by hand but its cumbersome. Thinking about extracting this via Chatgpt as a JSON and write it to the Account automatically…. Any ideas?

I am fetching “Reply Time (avg)” Metric from Core Front API on weekly basis.  The problem I'm encountering is that when there are no replies sent on a particular day, the reply time for that day is recorded as 0. However, when calculating the average weekly reply time, I don't want to include these 0 values if there are no replies on that day. How can I retrieve this metric accordingly?Because of 0s the “Reply Time (avg)” is getting significantly lowered.I'm open to alternative methodologies/approaches to address this issue. 

I am trying to use the frontapp API to get a url that directly links to the contact in frontapp. This url typically looks like "https://app.frontapp.com/contacts-manager/contacts/global/{{contact_identifier}}" When I use the API to retrieve the contact information, there is only one id field (starting with crd_), and it does not match the required contact_identifier needed for the url (which is a number) Can anyone tell me how to get the required contact_identifier? Or alternatively, is there a way to link to the contact page with the id from the API?

Hi,We've encountered an issue with the expiration of the refresh token. According to the documentation, refresh tokens are valid for 6 months.The documentation states:> Repeat this process as necessary, ensuring you use the refresh token at least once before its 6-month expiration to obtain a new set of credentials without having to restart the OAuth process from step one.However, when we use the `POST https://app.frontapp.com/oauth/token` endpoint to obtain a new pair of access and refresh tokens, we indeed receive a new valid access token (extended for 1 hour), but the refresh token remains unchanged, including its expiration.As a result, we are unable to update the refresh token. How can we resolve this issue?I am testing with the following refresh token:- Issued At: 1699617655 (11/10/2023, 2:00:55 PM)- Expiration Time: 1715342455 (5/10/2024, 3:00:55 PM)And I received the same token back from the `POST https://app.frontapp.com/oauth/token` endpoint.

Hi there,We just ingested raw Front data via Fivetran<> Front connector. However I’m struggling to reconcile the message “direction” - how is this determined?We want to use this data to track SLAs etc and monitor performance. We are also ingested the “analytics export” to get SLA specific data such as reply time.However, when I go to compare the two data sources (analytics export vs message data via Fivetran), I see that the message direction is sometimes different. Ie. in the analytics export it says its “inbound” whereas in the message data, it says “is_inbound” is false.This is confusing to me. Is it to do with cc.ing other members of the company? How come the two data methods don’t follow the same pattern?Would appreciate some insight on this! Thanks :)

Hi Front team. I want to bring my own custom, existing chatbot backend to Front. I don’t want to recreate my bot using Front bot tools. What would be the best and fastest approach to use a custom chatbot in Front? Do you have ideas on how to implement customer escalation from bot to human? My Front API doc reading suggests that using a custom channel to communicate the bot would work. What do you think of this approach?Thanks in advance. 

What’s the difference between “Avg Response Time” and “Avg Total Reply Time” ?  

Use case: I created a draft and I want to share it with my colleagues so they can edit it. They just have to click on this url and it opens the front webapp on a page where they can see and edit the draft / message. How do I create that url?

Hey,Is it possible when using the Create message reply endpoint to change the ‘from’ field?This is our use case:We receive an email from a client to a personal inbox We move it to a team inbox using Update conversation endpoint We reply to it using Create message reply endpointI’d like the ‘from’ address to be the one in the new inbox I moved the conversation to, but instead, the message is sent from the personal email that received the first message.How can I accomplish this?  Thanks!

I do not see an option to extract the account from the context API? I try to go throught the conversation via context.conversation.recipient?.contact but I do not see the account anywhere. Is this not possible?Basically I want to extract both the conversations recipient and their respective account (if any) from the context Its quite urgent and any help is highly appreciated. 

Hello,I started getting this error out of blue today while sending an attachment via the messages endpoint:{"_error":{"status":400,"title":"Bad request","message":"Body did not satisfy requirements","details":["body.body: missing"]}} The code that I am using to send the message and attachment hasn’t been changed in months and was working since this morning. Any idea why this would start happening all of the sudden? This is the request that i am sending: POST: .....messagesContent-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=----------------------------8dc226f5fd04b07Accept: application/jsonAuthorization: Bearer ****Host: api2.frontapp.comContent-Length: 99953Expect: 100-continueConnection: Keep-Alive------------------------------8dc226f5fd04b07Content-Disposition: form-data; name="subject";Test FRONT app integration------------------------------8dc226f5fd04b07Content-Disposition: form-data; name="body";This should have an attachment------------------------------8dc226f5fd04b07Content-Dispositio

When I try to connect a sidebar plugin to my localserver (e.g. http://localhost:5173/) I constantly get a cors issue from the front network:Request URL: http://localhost:5173/?auth_secret=ec16a8fd2f7765fcReferrer Policy: origin-when-cross-origin(blocked:other) I followed the exact tutorial using vite, then tried again with nextjs: Same error in both cases. What am I missing?  

Hey all,We thought we were utilizing all of Front’s features…. until today when we learned about dynamic objects - mind blown!  Since I am not a developer, we’re seeking any tips, tricks or help articles for how to configure a dynamic variable when the Target URL doesn’t include the “text pattern.” For example, I’d like to create a dynamic variable for our Order numbers, but our Salesforce link doesn’t actually ID the order number in the URL. Thanks for any advice!

Hi all,When a sender uses Front to compose an email in let’s say font Calibri size 14, then I receive it in Front in font Calibri size 11?What could be the reason for that and how do we fix it?Thanks in advance!

HiWe just plugged in Fivetran<> Front connector, and I'm checking out the schema.Not spotting any SLA data in the tables – kinda scratching my head here.I'm aiming to mirror that SLAs view in front analytics – , messages with SLAs, SLA breaches, % of SLA achievement, SLA breach time,Also would like to replicate those summary metrics for each conversation (interactions, messages sent, messages received, etc) but  can't seem to get convos to add up by conversation_ID using the messages table. Can u pls guide me here with these 2 points?Thanks!

So to start a new whatsapp conversation (to say, e.g., alert one of our customers about a status to their property which we service) we must send out an approved template. The front api for creating a message has no such template_id field. This should be okay, because you can `https://api2.frontapp.com/message_templates/{message_template_id}` to get the message template and then just use the body. except(1) this won’t fill in the tag fields automatically from the contact; and [more importantly](2) whatsapp rejects this message because it isn’t an approved template it seems if we use the same body it isn’t necessarily the same template. How can one use the api to send a template message to start a new whatsapp conversation?

I have created a draft using this endpoint: https://dev.frontapp.com/reference/create-draftNow my draft is done and I want to send it using the api. How do I send my draft?

When I make a call to this endpoint: https://dev.frontapp.com/reference/edit-draftI get the following error as a response from the frontapp api: `There is a new version of this draft`I don’t understand what is causing this error. What can I do? Just to clarify, the draft hasn’t been touched at all. In fact the update occur less than a second after the creation of the draft.

Two questions:1.-Ive completed the walk through for the Highway intergration. The issue i have is there are many different ways carriers, cusotmers, fastors, etc….use  MC. EXAMPLES: MC#123435, MC# 12345, MC12345, MC 123345, MC: 123445. Im catching very few MC’s because of this, Am i missing something?  I could create seperate objects, but that would consume a ton of time. (a copy or ability to use dyamic objects for other links, or an OR statement)  2.- Fraud detector, im getting multiple comments in conversations at times, i understood that the custom senders object was supposed to stop that part. Any help would be great.   

Has anyone (Front internal or external) explored using Microsoft Power Automate integration to connect / automate workflows with 3rd-party applications?  It looks like a Custom Connector would be possible. Build and certify custom connectors - Power Automate | Microsoft Learn 

I would like to send data to different third-party apps such as our CRM when certain actions happen in front. For example, every time a new contact has been created updated I would like to make a POST request to our CRM to keep the data in sync. I understand that I could use the front API to pull in new contacts from time to time from these third-party tools, but I would like to push instead of pool. is there a convenient way I can do this using front? 

Hello, I am implementing OAuth and I am having an error that I don’t understandHere is a record of the video showing the test  Here is the code use to send the request for getting access tokenexport const getFrontAccessToken = async (code: string, slug: string) => { const clientId = process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_FRONT_CLIENT_ID; const clientSecret = process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_FRONT_CLIENT_SECRET; const encodedAuth = btoa(`${clientId}:${clientSecret}`); console.log('getFrontAT ', clientId, clientSecret, encodedAuth); const response = await fetch('https://app.frontapp.com/oauth/token', { method: 'POST', body: JSON.stringify({ code, // redirect_uri: `http://localhost:3000/settings/${slug}/front`, grant_type: 'authorization_code', }), headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json', accept: 'application/json', Authorization: `Basic ${encodedAuth}`, }, }); console.log(await response.json());};