Working with Conversations in Team Messaging

Last updated: 2024-01-31

Contributors

A conversation in RingCentral parlance is a kind of chat between a fixed group of individuals. Conversations exhibit the following special qualities that set them apart from other types of chats:

They do not have names. They are defined instead by the members of the chat.
They cannot be deleted.
The members that belong to them cannot be changed.
One cannot leave a conversation, archive it, or unarchive it.

Conversation Types

Conversations can be further disambiguated by their assigned type. Here are the various types of conversations that the system supports, which is reflected by the conversation's type property.

Type	Description
`Personal`	A special chat that contains a single person. The personal chat can only be accessed by the sole member of the chat, making them in many ways private.
`Everyone`	Deprecated Perhaps considered the opposite of a personal chat, the "everyone" chat is a conversation whose members automatically contain every member of the organization. In this way, the "everyone" chat breaks some of the aforementioned rules, but is a conversation nonetheless.
`Group`	A group chat is a chat between a fixed group of three to sixteen individuals.
`Direct`	A direct chat is a chat between exactly two people.

Group chats have a limit of 16 members. If you need to chat between more than 16 people, use a team.

Creating a conversation

Conversations cannot be deleted or archived, so when creating a conversation you specify the members of the conversation. If a chat does currently exist containing exclusively those members, then a new conversation will be created and returned. However, if a conversation with those members already exists, it will be returned instead.

Finding the members of a conversation

When calling any of the conversation endpoints in the REST API, an array of members will be returned. The array will contain only the IDs of the members. To find the members' names, one can call the persons endpoint.

Example Conversations JSON

{
    "records": [
        {
            "id": "6090227714",
            "type": "Personal",
            "members": [
                {
                    "id": "61307231006"
                }
            ],
            "creationTime": "2015-10-06T12:39:43.455Z",
            "lastModifiedTime": "2018-12-10T08:49:43.035Z"
        },
        {
            "id": "6090235906",
            "type": "Direct",
            "members": [
                {
                    "id": "986580011"
                },
                {
                    "id": "61307231006"
                }
            ],
            "creationTime": "2015-10-06T12:39:43.471Z",
            "lastModifiedTime": "2018-12-10T14:01:34.006Z"
        },
    // ..snip..
    ]
}