Teams chat

Class representing a one-on-one, group or meeting chat in Microsoft Teams.

Format

An R6 object of class ms_chat, inheriting from ms_object.

Fields

• token: The token used to authenticate with the Graph host.

• tenant: The Azure Active Directory tenant for the parent drive.

• type: Always "chat" for a chat object.

• properties: The item properties (metadata).

Methods

• new(...): Initialize a new object. Do not call this directly; see 'Initialization' below.

• update(...): Update the chat's properties (metadata) in Microsoft Graph.

• do_operation(...): Carry out an arbitrary operation on the chat.

• sync_fields(): Synchronise the R object with the chat metadata in Microsoft Graph.

• send_message(body, content_type, attachments): Sends a new message to the chat. See below.

• list_messages(filter=NULL, n=50): Retrieves the messages in the chat. By default, this is limited to the 50 most recent messages; set the n argument to change this.

• get_message(message_id): Retrieves a specific message in the chat.

• delete_message(message_id, confirm=TRUE): Deletes a message. Currently the Graph API does not support deleting Teams messages, so this method is disabled.

• list_members(filter=NULL, n=Inf): Retrieves the members of the chat, as a list of ms_team_member objects.

• get_member(name, email, id): Retrieve a specific member of the chat, as a ms_team_member object. Supply only one of the member name, email address or ID.

Initialization

Creating new objects of this class should be done via the get_chat and list_chats methods of the ms_team class. Calling the new() method for this class only constructs the R object; it does not call the Microsoft Graph API to retrieve or create the actual chat.

Messaging

To send a message to a chat, use the send_message() method. This has arguments:

• body: The body of the message. This should be a character vector, which will be concatenated into a single string with newline separators. The body can be either plain text or HTML formatted.

• content_type: Either "text" (the default) or "html".

• attachments: Optional vector of filenames.

• inline: Optional vector of image filenames that will be inserted into the body of the message. The images must be PNG or JPEG, and the content_type argument must be "html" to include inline content.

• mentions: Optional vector of @mentions that will be inserted into the body of the message. This should be either an object of one of the following classes, or a list of the same: az_user, ms_team, ms_channel, ms_team_member. The content_type argument must be "html" to include mentions.

Message attachments are uploaded to your OneDrive for Business, in the folder "Microsoft Teams Chat Files". This is the same method as used by the regular Teams app. Unlike the Teams app, no localisation is performed, so the folder is always the same regardless of your language settings. As with channels, support for attachments is still somewhat experimental so please report any bugs found.

List methods

All list_* methods have filter and n arguments to limit the number of results. The former should be an OData expression as a string to filter the result set on. The latter should be a number setting the maximum number of (filtered) results to return. The default values are filter=NULL and n=Inf. If n=NULL, the ms_graph_pager iterator object is returned instead to allow manual iteration over the results.

Support in the underlying Graph API for OData queries is patchy. Not all endpoints that return lists of objects support filtering, and if they do, they may not allow all of the defined operators. If your filtering expression results in an error, you can carry out the operation without filtering and then filter the results on the client side.

See also

ms_team, ms_drive, ms_chat, ms_chat_message

Microsoft Graph overview, Microsoft Teams API reference

Examples

if (FALSE) {

chat <- get_chat("chat-id")

# a multi-line message with an attachment
msg_text <- c(
    "message line 1",
    "message line 2",
    "message line 3"
)
chat$send_message(msg_text, attachments="myfile.csv")

# sending an inline image
chat$send_message("", content_type="html", inline="graph.png")

# chat members
chat$list_members()
jane <- chat$get_member("Jane Smith")
bill <- chat$get_member(email="billg@mycompany.com")

# mentioning a team member
chat$send_message("Here is a message", content_type="html", mentions=jane)

# mentioning 2 or more members: use a list
chat$send_message("Here is another message", content_type="html",
    mentions=list(jane, bill))

}