Export MS Teams chat

[Ob18kenobi]

I try to download the chat in a Microsoft Teams website (teams.microsoft.com). Unfortunately only the surroundings (name of teams etc) are saved, the actual chat is completely empty. I have the same problem when trying to print the page or use the save functionality of Firefox itself.

It would be great to have the possibility to download Teams Chat, the internet if full of people trying to archive the chat and there seems to be no simple solution.

[gildas-lormeau]

I just did a test in Chrome and Firefox and it worked fine for me even though I cannot really test the chat because I'm alone in my team and I cannot chat with myself. Here is the page I saved in the attached zip file. Did you change any setting in SingleFile?

Edit: removed the link since I was not able to reproduce the issue, see next post.

[gildas-lormeau]

I invited myself in Teams and I was able to chat and save the conversation without any particular issue.

[gildas-lormeau]

Actually, I noticed icons of the participants were missing when using Firefox. The fix for this issue will be available in the next version.

[Ob18kenobi]

Thank you for your extremely quick reply!

Reading it I thought the reason might be some restrictions with my work laptop but unfortunately I have the same problem when trying it from my private computer. I just did a clean install of SingleFile, I use Firefox.

Can you share the URL of the teams site you used for your test? Maybe it is an issue with our Teams?

[Ob18kenobi]

Or I could invite you to a Teams if you give me an email address - not sure if there is a way to privately communicate here?

[gildas-lormeau]

You can contact me at gildas.lormeau@gmail.com and I'll invite you in my team.

[Ob18kenobi]

I just tested saving different chas and I think I am starting to see a pattern. I can save shorter chats just like the example you did but with longer chats that contain more posts the save file is blank. Or it might some kind of message type (smilys, pictures, ...) which creates the problem?

[gildas-lormeau]

@Ob18kenobi I think I was a bit optimistic yesterday when I told you the CLI tool would help to solve this problem. I dis some test and there are actually 2 issues that makes things more complicated than I expected:

• the page is private so I have to inject cookies or simulate a login
• it looks like that when the page is saved with a large screen, only the top of the page can be viewed when displayed on a normal screen

[Ob18kenobi]

:-(

I guess there is a reason why no publicly available tool is able to export a full teams chat. Thank you for giving it a try! And thank you for SingleFile, a very useful addon. Unless you have other ideas to solve this we can close this issue.

[gildas-lormeau]

** UPDATE ** You can use an extension instead of applying the instructions below manually, see https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/single-file-export-chat.

@Ob18kenobi Well there is a maybe solution but it's a bit manual and specific to Microsoft Teams.

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Make sure that you scrolled to the top and the bottom of the chat conversation you want to save
2. Press F12 to open the developer tools
3. Select the tab "Console" in the developer tools
4. Paste the code below in the console, it should zoom out the page

const zoomFactor = (document.querySelector(".ts-main-flex").offsetHeight / document.querySelector(".list-wrap").offsetHeight);
document.documentElement.style.setProperty("transform", "scale(" + zoomFactor + ")");
document.documentElement.style.setProperty("transform-origin", "top");
document.documentElement.style.setProperty("min-height", (100 / zoomFactor) + "vh");

5. Once the page is fully loaded, paste the code below in the console, it should expand all the grouped chats.

document.querySelectorAll(".expand-collapse").forEach(link => link.click());
document.querySelectorAll(".ts-see-more-button.ts-see-more-fold").forEach(link => link.click());

6. Paste the code below in the console, it should adjust the zoom level

const newZoomFactor = (document.querySelector(".ts-main-flex").offsetHeight / document.querySelector(".list-wrap").offsetHeight);
document.documentElement.style.setProperty("transform", "scale(" + newZoomFactor + ")");
document.documentElement.style.setProperty("min-height", (100 / newZoomFactor) + "vh");

7. Once the page is fully loaded, paste the code below to reset the zoom and add a scrollbar

document.documentElement.style.removeProperty("transform");
document.documentElement.style.removeProperty("transform-origin");
document.documentElement.style.setProperty("overflow", "auto");

8. Save the page with SingleFile
9. Take a coffee, enjoy the passing of time, pray for your CPU
10. And voilà! Your saved page should be okay

[Ob18kenobi]

@gildas-lormeau
Ok, tried this. When entering the code after step 4 I get the following errors:

The first one is about a lack of declaration of the "Zeichenkodierung" - declaration of character code in English? Complains that the code is not found but should be within the first 1024 characters.
The second one is about memory usage of "will-change". It is to high, the limit is area of the document multiplied by 3 (1828272 px). Usage of "will-change" beyond the limit will be ignored.

The zoomed out version looks like it did work properly (but hard to see obviously, there might be blank spaces in the end). I then did step 6 which only semi-worked: the document is back to normal size but the scroll bar to the right is gone. I only see the initial part and cannot scroll down (no scroll bar, mouse wheel or arrow keys have no effect).

[gildas-lormeau]

The errors you see can be ignored, these are just warnings actually.

I'm really surprised the scrollbar is not displayed. If you want, you can send me the saved page in our conversation on MS Teams and I'll try to see what went wrong.

[Ob18kenobi]

I should do more tests before posting here....
Just tried it again, this time it works fine. Same Teams. Random glitch? Anyway: Yeah, this is great! Thanks a lot.

The only remaining issue are the cases where Teams chats are grouped and closed by Teams. In that case the archived version cannot show the content. One option is to manually open all before archiving, a bit tedious but feasible.

[gildas-lormeau]

I'm glad to hear it works. I updated the instructions to open all the grouped chats, see steps 5 to 8.

Edit 1: I updated the code.
Edit 2: There is a bug when adjusting the zoom factor, I'm trying to fix it.
Edit 3: It should be fixed. Also, you won't need to save the page twice with this new procedure.

[Ob18kenobi]

@gildas-lormeau

Thank you for the updates and sorry for the late reply. Semi-sucess:
I tried multiple times with different Teams. Sometimes it works fine, sometimes it works but the chat is not expanded. And sometime it gets stuck in step 5 with the following error message:

This seems to be either an infinite or a very long loop, after half an hour the console is still scrolling with this error message, step 5 never finishes.

I also noticed one more issue: If a single post is long Teams does not show the entire post, only the first 10 lines or so and then there is a "show more" button. Is it possible to include an instruction to also show long posts?