Microsoft GRAPH API not returning all messages in teams channel.

Question

Hi,

I'm using "/beta/teams/{group-id-for-teams}/channels/{channel-id}/messages" (also tried /v1.0/teams/...) to get all messages of the channel of my team. I'm aware of the @odata.nextLink field, but even after using it many times until it disappears, the response does not contain every message in the channel. (I've also tried using $top=20 parameter, but the response was the same.)

I get the most recent message in the channel and also a lot of messages of systemEventMessage type.

For authentication, I've tried both ways - application and using delegated user.

The permissions set up in my application are:

• Group.Read.All
• Files.Read.All
• ChannelMessage.Read.All

Answer 1

In Microsoft Teams, every message in a channel is part of a conversation thread. The first message starts the thread and all subsequent messages are considered replies to that thread. This is by design to keep conversations organized and contextual. When you use the Microsoft Graph API to fetch messages from a channel, the /messages endpoint will only return the first message of each thread in the channel. To get the replies (or subsequent messages) of a thread, you need to use the /replies endpoint on the original message. The @odata.nextLink is provided when the result set exceeds the maximum page size. It’s a URL that you can use to get the next page of results. If you’re seeing a lot of system event messages, it’s because Teams automatically generates these for certain activities (like adding members to a team). I hope this clarifies your question. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.
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