Developer Q&A

Is there a decent way to bypass the sidebar cache when I release hotfixes to private plugins?I made a React app and it works fine for testing with our development server (Vite), but for production I precompile it to JavaScript and serve with Nginx. This works flawlessly, but when I make changes, Front doesn’t download the new code. I tried Front in a private tab and it worked fine, so as I recall I cleared the cache on my main tab and got it working there too. With the desktop client I wasn’t so lucky. Signing out or closing wasn’t enough to fix it, and I think I tried a few things in developer tools too. I had to open the hidden menu and choose Reset App Data to get it to clear. I can’t ask end users to do that whenever I make a breaking change to the backend API.Is there a way for me to do it as the developer / company admin, short of deleting the sidebar app and making a new one? I tried adding an extra parameter to the query string and that didn’t help. We are all using the desktop

Hello all, Using the “Import message” event with a shared inbox. It fails because "Body did not satisfy requirements.” Any suggestions?  

When working with certain file names, I've noticed an issue with the 'Download attachment' endpoint. Specifically, when using this endpoint, the returned file has an incorrect name. For instance, if I send a message with the file name 'filename_MM/DD/YYYY.format' and then utilize the 'Download attachment' endpoint, the retrieved file is named 'YYYY.format' instead of the expected 'filename_MM/DD/YYYY.format'. Strangely, the file name appears correctly when using the 'Get message' endpoint to retrieve the attachment within the message.I would appreciate your guidance on identifying the cause of this discrepancy and suggestions on resolving the issue associated with the 'Download attachment' endpoint. Thank you.

Hello, We currently have a Front Integration using the Core APIs.  When creating drafts, we would like to use the default channel that the user is part of as per their preferences (see below screenshot)Is there an API to get this channel for a given teammate/user? Thanks!

Issue with the Load the web page through the iframe view and not update when changing the conversation in the sidebar app.

HI Guys,How I can find client_id and client_secrets. Is there a sandbox environment to test api’s.

Ive set up dynamic objects using a 3rd party API. Is it possible to use the same server and API to build a sidebar plugin? 

Hey if anyone knows how to fix this I would greatly appreciate the help! I’m trying to automate our client onboarding process to create a Front inbox for each client we have. In Zapier (that’s where all of our automation/apis/onboarding stuff is stored) I am doing an API Request (Beta) in Front trying to create the inbox. Below is a screenshot of how it’s currently set up: When I run this I get back the following:{"_error":{"status":400,"title":"Bad request","message":"Body did not satisfy requirements","details":["body.name: missing"]}}Can anyone help me get this error resolved so that it recognizes the name I’m trying to give it? Thanks so much!

Hey, We have started using discussions for chat and office announcements. Is there an option to export discussions to a file? Sometimes we need to find an information in an older announcement but the search function doesn’t work as the history is not loaded. The only option is to scroll up but it takes a lot of time. Thanks, 

Is it feasible to retrieve the URL of a conversation within the FrontApp application through the API? Specifically, I am referring to the URL structure within the FrontApp application itself. It seems that the URL structure differs, and there are no apparent 'conversation' or 'message' IDs corresponding to what the API returns.For instance, in the case of a conversation in a shared inbox, the URL structure is as follows: 'https://app.frontapp.com/inboxes/teams/folders/{somenumbers}/unassigned/{somenumbers}'.

Hello:I was wondering which would be the best way to retrieve the important information in the body of a message through the API.Actually, I am retrieving all the messages from a conversation through the endPoint:https://api2.frontapp.com/conversations/{cnv_id}/messagesThen, I get the text of the message through the property:_results[x].textBut it gets to a point in the conversation where signatures and threads are included in the text property.Is this related to the way email clients deal with the emails? Or is there a better way to retrieve this information from the API?Thanks a lot for your time.My best regards.Juan.

I’m unable to understand the search filters regarding conversation status. The docs list a number of status to filter on here using the “is” field name https://dev.frontapp.com/docs/search-1, but they’re not explained, and they’re not mutually exclusive. A convo can’t be “assigned” AND “unassigned” but it can be “assigned” AND “open”?In this community answer the solution url ishttps://api2.frontapp.com/conversations/search/is:assigned%20is:openwhich works for me. The comment talks about “open” serving to filter archived convos, but this isn’t explained. But if I remove “is:open” from my own searches, the “assigned” status is ignored; everything is returned. ie this returns convos with status: archived:https://api2.frontapp.com/conversations/search/is:assigned%20is:openif I replace “open” with “unreplied”, I also get every status message. Can you help me understand how all the “is” options work? Thanks! Also, minor thing, the docs have a bug - https://dev.frontapp.com/reference/search-c

Hi! My company has a use case to list conversations in a specific inbox that have been created since a specific, dynamic, timestamp. Ex: we want to list all new conversations in an inbox that have been created within the last 30 minutes.  So far, we’ve been attempting to use the list conversations endpoint, and newly created search endpoint, without success. Each time, it seems the Front API is returning a much larger timeframe of conversations within the inbox.  Here’s the API request we’re currently using: https://api2.frontapp.com/conversations/search/inbox:XYZ after:1694445506?limit=100 Has anyone had success here? Would love to hear if there’s a better way!

 I’m working on setting up an automation between Front and Clio (law firm management software that my firm uses), and have to use the Front API through Zapier’s API Request Beta. I currently have a Company Rule in Front that triggers off of adding a tag to a conversation and then sends a POST to a Zapier webhook. I’m trying to then pull conversation fields via the below API GET request, but an receiving the error seen in the below screenshot. I’m adept with Zapier and have used it with Front previously, but unfortunately the specific process automation I’m building requires use of the API and I’m admittedly not super familiar with dealing with those requests. Any suggestions to get the GET request pinging the conversations end point working? 

Is there any possibility to fetch the messages (not conversation) which has respond time more than 48 hours (example). The purpose of this to fetch the messages respond which has breached pre-defined SLAs (which in our case is 48 hours). So, what I am thinking is to fetch number of messages sent in a specific time period and then fetch the messages with respond time more than 48 hours. The below code (API Endpoint) can be used to fetch number of messages sent: import requestsurl = "https://api2.frontapp.com/analytics/reports"payload = { "metrics": ["num_messages_sent"] }headers = {    "accept": "application/json",    "content-type": "application/json",    "authorization": "Bearer <Token>"}response = requests.post(url, json=payload, headers=headers)print(response.text) But how can I fetch messages with respond time more than 48 hours ?If there is better approach to perform same task, feel free to mention ? 

Hello! I’ve recently ben working through the FCA certification, and I’m excited by all the different aspects of Front that are available. I’m the head of the B2B division of my company, and serve as the admin for our employees who use Front, primarily our sales and customer service teams.I’m wondering if there are any users who already use the same services that I use, and if you’ve figured out any clever context links that I could implement in my system. The most common services we receive communication from are Faire, QuickBooks, Asana, Shopify, and Dialpad Voice. If anyone has developed custom fields or context links for these services, I’d love to hear about it.Thanks in advance! 

Paginating over the events API is broken:I’m using the “list events” API. My first request is to https://api2.frontapp.com/events The response contains some events + _pagination.next = https://relayapp.api.frontapp.com/events?page_token=Token_1 When I use the next page URL, I get the following response: The exact same events as in my first request (I was expecting the next batch of events) As _pagination.next, I receive the exact same URL I’ve just requested (with page_token=Token_1) This makes this API unusable, since I don’t have a way to paginate and iterate over events.Note:This happens both with and without a query. So it can’t be a query issue on my side. Also this only happens in /events, but pagination works as expected for any other API (e.g. conversations). However, only /events is jumping from the api2.frontapp.com domain to my app-specific domain in pagination, so might be related to that?Is there a known bug on your side?Thanks!Luis.

I’d like to use the Core API to generate draft messages. In the docs, I notice that there are examples for use in JavaScript (including fetch and XHR APIs). When I tested this code in the browser console, the request was rejected due to cross-origin headers (specifically the requesting origin was not allowed by Access-Control-Allowed-Origins). Is calling the API from the browser supported? And if so, how would I go about configuring CORS headers?Thanks!

Instead of calling Webhook URL without any authentication , can Front consume an API with Basic Authentication and send the Event payload real-time rule based ?

Do you have recommendations on how one would integrate the following:  CRM Phone System Any advice here would be greatly appreciated! 

Hi all, I would love to get some advice on this requirement,When a Front conversation is tagged with a specific tag, I want to be able to fetch some information in my CRM and depending on the results, I want to choose if the link should be added or not.My initial idea was to do as following : The specific tag is added to the conversation A rule is triggered to add a comment with a specific format A Dynamic object (former context links) rule will be triggered based on the matching text in the comments A specific information is fetched from ou CRM Depending on the results, I choose to add the link or not (or alternatively I update a conversation custom field which will trigger a new rule...)It seems to me that we can’t add any conditions logic inside the dynamic object setup, would anyone have a workaround idea ?I also tried to update a conversation custom field from a dynamic object fetch information result, but again, this doesn’t seem possible

Hi guys, I am trying to fetch the average reply time between the dates Oct 29, 2023 and Nov 4, 2023 via API. I am using this Analytics API Endpoint “"https://api2.frontapp.com/analytics/reports"” to fetch the data point i.e. 4 h and 56 m (can be seen in the below attached image as well). I am using below python code to fetch data: import requestsimport time url = "https://api2.frontapp.com/analytics/reports" payload = {"filters": { "inbox_ids": ["<inbox ID>"]},"start": 1698519600000 / 1000,"end": 1699124399999 / 1000,"metrics": ["avg_response_time"] # 29 Oct to 4 Nov 2023 | 18963.617021276597 Seconds | 5 hrs 16 mins | On front => 4 hrs 56 mins}headers = {"accept": "application/json","content-type": "application/json","authorization": "Bearer <Token>"} response = requests.post(url, json=payload, headers=headers)print("Process Initiating")time.sleep(5)print("avg_response_time")print(response.json()) Upon response of above code I am getting “18963.617021276597” seconds metr

I would like to know if I can have front to authenticate a user against a front plugin. The plugin does receive an auth_secret but it is a global value and can easily be traced in the http inspector.Is there an option to have an auth_secret per user that only that user can see?How secure is the `tea_XXXX` id I can find in `context.teammate.id`. I think that these don’t seem to be not visible / guessable on the front end?Basically, how sure can I be that in the context that my plugin receives, the teammate is actually the currently logged in front teammate and that the context has not been tampered with? Thanks,Tilmann

Based on rules and also the option to, for example, return the conversation stages as a 'tag' so that they are also visible, or as a view in Front.

I'm working on an integration project. In the initial phase of this integration, I aim to create a web application with a webhook feature. This allows clients to integrate the application into their front-end. When specific events occur, the requests will be forwarded to the application configured in the webhook.I'm seeking a method to distinguish which client is sending the request. Specifically, I'm exploring the possibility of configuring multiple API keys or OAuth tokens (one for each client) that can be included in the request payload.