2. Creating and populating conversations

Reference: {#RefCreateAndPopulateConvs}

Author: Matthias Fischmann

---

This will walk you through creating and populating a conversation using curl commands and the credentials of an ordinary user (member role).

If you have a system for identity management like a SAML IdP, you may be able to use that as a source of user and group information, and write a script or a program based on this document to keep your wire conversations in sync with your groups.

Sidenote: in the future we may implement groups in our SCIM API to handle conversations. For the time being, we hope you consider the approach explained here a decent work-around.

2.1. Prerequisites

We will talk to the backend using the API that the clients use, so we need a pseudo-user that we can authenticate as. We assume this user has been created by other means. For the sake of testing, you could just use the team admin (but you don’t need admin privileges for this user).

So here is some shell environment we will need:

export WIRE_BACKEND=https://prod-nginz-https.wire.com
export WIRE_USER=...
export WIRE_PASSWD=...
export WIRE_TEAMID=...

Now you can login and get a wire token to authenticate all further requests:

export BEARER=$(curl -X POST \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --header 'Accept: application/json' \
  -d '{"email":"'"$WIRE_USER"'","password":"'"$WIRE_PASSWD"'"}' \
  $WIRE_BACKEND/login'?persist=false' | jq -r .access_token)

This token will be good for 15 minutes; after that, just repeat.

If you don’t want to install jq, you can just call the curl command and copy the access token into the shell variable manually.

Here is a quick test that you’re logged in:

curl -X GET --header "Authorization: Bearer $BEARER" \
  $WIRE_BACKEND/self

2.2. Contact requests

If $WIRE_USER is in a team, all other team members are implicitly connected to it. So for the users in your team, you don’t have to do anything here.

TODO: contact requests to users not on the team.

2.3. Conversations

To create a converation with no users (except the pseudo-user creating it):

export WIRE_CONV_NAME="The B-Team"
export WIRE_CONV='{
  "users": [],
  "name": "'${WIRE_CONV_NAME}'",
  "team": {
    "teamid": "'${WIRE_TEAMID}'"
  },
  "receipt_mode": 0,
  "message_timer": 0
}'

export CONV_ID=$(curl -X POST --header "Authorization: Bearer $BEARER" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d "$WIRE_CONV" \
  $WIRE_BACKEND/conversations | jq -r .id)

The users field can contain UUIDs that need to point to existing wire users (in your team or not), and $WIRE_USER needs to have an accepted connection with them. You can extract these ids from the corresponding SCIM user records. If in doubt, leave empty.

You can also add and remove users once the converation has been created:

curl -X POST --header "Authorization: Bearer $BEARER" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "users": ["b4b6a96c-70c8-11e9-99e6-f3ea044b132c", "b7293854-70c8-11e9-b620-97ff1eba6324"] }' \
  $WIRE_BACKEND/conversations/$CONV_ID/members

curl -X DELETE --header "Authorization: Bearer $BEARER" \
  $WIRE_BACKEND/conversations/$CONV_ID/members/b9f1c786-70c8-11e9-91a6-fbeb48cdcdd1

You can also look at one or all conversations:

curl -X GET --header "Authorization: Bearer $BEARER" \
  $WIRE_BACKEND/conversations/ids

curl -X GET --header "Authorization: Bearer $BEARER" \
  $WIRE_BACKEND/conversations/

curl -X GET --header "Authorization: Bearer $BEARER" \
  $WIRE_BACKEND/conversations/$CONV_ID/

Finally, conversations can be renamed or deleted:

curl -X PUT --header "Authorization: Bearer $BEARER" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "name": "The C-Team" }' \
  $WIRE_BACKEND/conversations/$CONV_ID

curl -X DELETE --header "Authorization: Bearer $BEARER" \
  $WIRE_BACKEND/teams/$WIRE_TEAMID/conversations/$CONV_ID

2.4. Advanced topics

TODO: pseudo-user leaving the conv, and being added by admin for changes later.