[CHATWOOT] - Import contacts and messages and syncronize

[rafwell]

Guys, I'm losing some sales because the company cannot lost the chat history, so they cant start with me :(
Sounds good to have a way to import contacts and messages and sincronize on demand when needed

Describe the solution you'd like

I'd like a endpoint to request a sync between Chatwoot and Waha history. So the user can have the history on chatwoot. I think it's important and you help when cases on whatsapp is disconnected or have another problem, also for new users.

Maybe have a maximum period like the latest 7, 15, 30 whatever, days to sync

Cheers

[devlikepro]

We are currently collecting feedback on the ChatWoot integration and will fix bugs and add features in the next iteration once we have a better understanding of what users are using!

You can track all requests by the label:
https://github.com/devlikeapro/waha/issues?q=state%3Aopen%20label%3A%22apps%3AChatWoot%22

Let's see how many and supporters needs the fix and prioritize it based on that.

[devlikepro]

For contacts it's easy, but for messages it's a bit hard to coordinate because chatwoot doesn't have history api (so we can not start processing new messages until the history sync has been completed)

[igordisco]

What if there was an input field to retrieve messages from "7 days ago," or something like that?

Does the user choose how many days WAHA will retrieve and insert into Chatwoot?

[rafwell]

@igordisco my idea is Waha do a query for search all messages of the latest x days and insert into chatwoot

[igordisco]

boa!

[devlikepro]

Related: some users want to start new conversations after one gets closed — see #1237.

Potentially, if you have “new conversations” enabled, then for each sync messages 7 days command we could create a new conversation for every contact/chat, so it doesn't affect the current chats.

However, with the “single chat = single conversation” approach (the current, default one), this could get messy if you first run sync 1 days, then sync 7 days, or if someone sends a message to the same chat during the sync process.

The Chatwoot API doesn’t allow inserting messages, only appending them to the conversation.

So yeah - sync contacts will probably land in the next Chatwoot App 1.1 release (next month 🤞 ). But messages are trickier, we need to think through that 🤔

[rafwell]

Got it. I checked the Chatwoot API documentation and saw that it's actually not possible to insert messages retroactively, since it's not possible to specify the message date. What a shame.

Importing contacts is nice, but importing messages would be essential to maintain quality and ensure that all WhatsApp messages are actually in Chatwoot. Sessions often drop with WhatsApp, leaving a 'hole' in Chatwoot. It's hard to convince the client.

Of course, this doesn't depend on Waha.

The only alternative I see would be to pass the Postgres database access data to Waha via .env, and have this synchronization done directly in the database. But that's sad.

[igordisco]

@rafwell Do you think we can create a way to insert into cw via pg?

[igordisco]

I managed to do it in an improvised way.

I created a flow in N8N that accesses the Waha API and downloads the messages.

I used the GET /api/{session}/chats/{chatId}/messages endpoint and set the time to 7 days.

I sort by timestamp, check if there is already a conversation for that contact or if I need to create a new one

And I insert the message directly into Postgres. I used the query below:

INSERT INTO public.messages (
  content,
  account_id,
  inbox_id,
  conversation_id,
  message_type,
  created_at,
  updated_at,
  source_id,
  content_type,
  sender_type,
  sender_id,
  processed_message_content
)

And i put

WHERE NOT EXISTS (
  SELECT 1 FROM public.messages WHERE source_id = 'WAID:{{ $json._data.Info.ID }}'
);

In other words, it only inserts the message if it's not already in the database.

It's still a bit confusing, but apparently, this is the only way to insert retroactive messages in Chatwoot.

[paulobautz]

+1