跟踪从不同服务器会话到一个号码的对话链

Question

I'm creating an app which will allow all users to initiate conversation with page owner using Chat-to-SMS service.

Problem is that I'm not sure how to track conversations since there would be one conversation chain from SMS Provider <-> page owner. When owner clicks reply, it needs to know which session user it needs to send the message to.

Basically, I need to do opposite what is being explained here: https://www.twilio.com/docs/quickstart/php/sms/tracking-conversations

How should I accomplish this? I can't quite wrap my head around this.

Answer 1

Twilio developer evangelist here.

If you are sending all the chat messages to just one SMS number then there is no easy way to tie replies back to the original message. (As a quick experiment, if you open an SMS conversation in your own phone and try to reply to any message that wasn't the latest one, you'll see it's not possible.)

There are workarounds though.

You could, when forwarding the message, generate an ID for it. Then get your page owner to include that ID when responding to that message, that way you can route the message back to the original sender and strip out the ID.

Alternatively, when replying you could always respond to the last message that came in. This relies on there not being much traffic, allowing the page owner to respond before the next message arrives. This is error prone though.

Another alternative is purchasing a new number for each new conversation. You could expire the number after a predetermined amount of time. This is made much easier with Twilio Proxy , which was announced recently and is currently in preview.

Let me know if that helps at all.