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Channel and Group chat conversations with a Microsoft Teams bot

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Important

This article is based on the v3 Bot Framework SDK. If you are looking for current documentation version 4.6 or later of the SDK, see the conversational bots section.

Microsoft Teams allows users to bring bots into their channel or group chat conversations. By adding a bot to a team or chat, all users of the conversation can take advantage of the bot functionality right in the conversation. You can also access Teams-specific functionality within your bot like querying team information and @mentioning users.

Chat in channels and group chats differs from personal chat in that the user needs to @mention the bot. If a bot is used in multiple scopes such as personal, group chat, or channel, you need to detect what scope the bot messages came from, and process them accordingly.

Designing a great bot for channels or groups

Bots added to a team become another team member and can be @mentioned as part of the conversation. In fact, bots only receive messages when they're @mentioned, so other conversations on the channel aren't sent to the bot.

A bot in a group or channel should provide information relevant and appropriate for all members. While your bot can certainly provide any information relevant to the experience, keep in mind conversations with it are visible to everyone. Therefore, a great bot in a group or channel should add value to all users, and certainly not inadvertently share information more appropriate to a one-to-one conversation.

Your bot, just as it is, may be entirely relevant in all scopes without requiring more work. In Teams, there's no expectation that your bot function in all scopes, but you should ensure that your bot provides user value in whichever scope(s) you choose to support.

Developing a bot that works in groups or channels uses much of the same functionality as personal conversations. Additional events and data in the payload provide Teams group and channel information. Those differences, as well as key differences in common functionality are described in the following sections.

Creating messages

For more information on bots creating messages in channels, see Proactive messaging for bots, and specifically Creating a channel conversation.

Receiving messages

For a bot in a group or channel, in addition to the regular message schema, your bot also receives the following properties:

  • channelData See Teams channel data. In a group chat, contains information specific to that chat.
  • conversation.id The reply chain ID, consisting of channel ID plus the ID of the first message in the reply chain.
  • conversation.isGroup Is true for bot messages in channels or group chats.
  • conversation.conversationType Either groupChat or channel.
  • entities Can contain one or more mentions. For more information, see Mentions.

Replying to messages

To reply to an existing message, call ReplyToActivity in .NET or session.send in Node.js. The Bot Builder SDK handles all the details.

If you choose to use the REST API, you can also call the /conversations/{conversationId}/activities/{activityId} endpoint.

In a channel, replying to a message shows as a reply to the initiating reply chain. The conversation.id contains the channel and the top level message ID. Although the Bot Framework takes care of the details, you can cache that conversation.id for future replies to that conversation thread as needed.

Best practice: Welcome messages in Teams

When your bot is first added to the group or team, it's useful to send a welcome message introducing the bot to all users. The welcome message should provide a description of the bot’s functionality and user benefits. Ideally the message should also include commands for the user to interact with the app. To do this, ensure that your bot responds to the conversationUpdate message, with the teamsAddMembers eventType in the channelData object. Be sure that the memberAdded ID is the bot's App ID itself, because the same event is sent when a user is added to a team. For more information, see Team member or bot addition.

You might also want to send a personal message to each member of the team when the bot is added. To do this, you could fetch the team roster and send each user a direct message.

We recommend that your bot not send a welcome message in the following situations:

  • The team is large (obviously subjective, for example, more than 100 members). Your bot may be seen as 'spammy' and the person who added it may get complaints unless you clearly communicate your bot's value proposition to everyone who sees the welcome message.
  • Your bot is first mentioned in a group or channel, versus being first added to a team.
  • A group or channel is renamed.
  • A team member is added to a group or channel.

@ Mentions

Because bots in a group or channel respond only when they're mentioned ("@botname") in a message, every message received by a bot in a group channel contains its own name, and you must ensure your message parsing handles that. In addition, bots can parse out other users mentioned and mention users as part of their messages.

Retrieving mentions

Mentions are returned in the entities object in payload and contain both the unique ID of the user and, in most cases, the name of user mentioned. You can retrieve all mentions in the message by calling the GetMentions function in the Bot Builder SDK for .NET, which returns an array of Mentioned objects.

.NET example code: Check for and strip @bot mention

Mention[] m = sourceMessage.GetMentions();
var messageText = sourceMessage.Text;

for (int i = 0;i < m.Length;i++)
{
    if (m[i].Mentioned.Id == sourceMessage.Recipient.Id)
    {
        //Bot is in the @mention list.
        //The below example will strip the bot name out of the message, so you can parse it as if it wasn't included. Note that the Text object will contain the full bot name, if applicable.
        if (m[i].Text != null)
            messageText = messageText.Replace(m[i].Text, "");
    }
}

Note

You can also use the Teams extension function GetTextWithoutMentions, which strips out all mentions, including the bot.

Node.js example code: Check for and strip @bot mention

var text = message.text;
if (message.entities) {
    message.entities
        .filter(entity => ((entity.type === "mention") && (entity.mentioned.id.toLowerCase() === botId)))
        .forEach(entity => {
            text = text.replace(entity.text, "");
        });
    text = text.trim();
}

You can also use the Teams extension function getTextWithoutMentions, which strips out all mentions, including the bot.

Constructing mentions

Your bot can mention other users in messages posted into channels. To do this, your message must do the following:

  • Include <at>@username</at> in the message text.
  • Include the mention object inside the entities collection.

.NET example

This example uses the Microsoft.Bot.Connector.Teams NuGet package.

// Create reply activity
Activity replyActivity = activity.CreateReply();

// Construct text of the form @sender Hello
replyActivity.Text = "Hello ";
replyActivity.AddMentionToText(activity.From, MentionTextLocation.AppendText);

// Send the reply activity
await client.Conversations.ReplyToActivityAsync(replyActivity);

Node.js example

// User to mention
var toMention: builder.IIdentity = {
    name: 'John Doe',
    id: userId
};

// Create a message and add mention to it
var msg = new teams.TeamsMessage(session).text(teams.TeamsMessage.getTenantId(session.message));
var mentionedMsg = msg.addMentionToText(toMention);

// Post the message
var generalMessage = mentionedMsg.routeReplyToGeneralChannel();
session.send(generalMessage);

Example: Outgoing message with user mentioned

{
    "type": "message", 
    "text": "Hey <at>Pranav Smith</at> check out this message",
    "timestamp": "2017-10-29T00:51:05.9908157Z",
    "localTimestamp": "2017-10-28T17:51:05.9908157-07:00",
    "serviceUrl": "https://skype.botframework.com",
    "channelId": "msteams",
    "from": {
        "id": "28:9e52142b-5e5e-4d7b-bb3e- e82dcf620000",
        "name": "SchemaTestBot"
    },
    "conversation": {
        "id": "19:aebd0ad4d6ab42c8b9ed19c251c2fc37@thread.skype;messageid=1481567603816"
    },
    "recipient": {
        "id": "8:orgid:6aebbad0-e5a5-424a-834a-20fb051f3c1a",
        "name": "stlrgload100"
    },
    "attachments": [
        {
            "contentType": "image/png",
            "contentUrl": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a6/Bender_Rodriguez.png",
            "name": "Bender_Rodriguez.png"
        }
    ],
    "entities": [
        {
            "type":"mention",
            "mentioned":{
                "id":"29:08q2j2o3jc09au90eucae",
                "name":"Pranav Smith"
            },
            "text": "<at>@Pranav Smith</at>"
        }
    ],
    "replyToId": "3UP4UTkzUk1zzeyW"
}

Accessing groupChat or channel scope

Your bot can do more than send and receive messages in groups and teams. For instance, it can also fetch the list of members, including their profile information, and the list of channels. For more information, see Get context for your Microsoft Teams bot.

See also

Bot Framework samples.