Hangouts Chat: get all messages in a thread

Question

Is there a way to get all messages belonging to a thread?

We know from https://developers.google.com/hangouts/chat/reference/rest/v1/spaces.messages#Message that a Message belongs to a Thread, is there an API to fetch all messages for a given thread?

Sergiosergipe

Answer 1

I believe that is not possible to get all the messages in a thread, by security design. A bot only receives an event when it is directly mentioned in a message and is only granted access to the text of that message.

The event object received by the bot includes a message object with details of the message, including a reference to the thread.

I wrote a simple Apps Script bot whose onMessage function returns the event object as JSON. The message part of the event provides very limited information about the thread:

    "thread": {
        "retentionSettings": {
            "state": "PERMANENT"
        },
        "name": "spaces/sKkv0fAAAAE/threads/F6qY-rYiwr0"
    },

This behaviour is the same for rooms and DMs.

Human users can scan rooms for threads and threads for messages but bots cannot.

Ar

I'm most interested not in the use of the Bot per se but to have an API call (or many of them) that can fetch messages in a thread. For example: how does the Chat app or website does it? There must be some way in which you can group all messages of a thread... – Sergiosergipe

I would like that too but, as far as I can tell, currently Google only offers automation and an API for bots. Bots can only run as service accounts, with limited privileges. – Ar

There is a feature request for this. – Admeasurement