Show system messages in conversation history using iOS Twilio SDK

Question

Hi I have been working on one of my apps for integrating chat using Twilio SDK. I would want to know if it is possible to get the system message inside a channel for eg: 'Member A joined the channel', 'Member B left the channel', 'Member C accepted the invitation to join' and so on. It seems like Twilio SDK does not have API to get the system messages or to set them. How can we achieve this?

I also noticed that it can be achieved by setting the custom key-value pair in attributes inside the message and sending it to the channel. But for the newly invited members, they cannot send a message when they are declining the invitation request such as 'Member A declined the invitation to join channel', as they have not joined the channel yet.

Answer 1

Twilio developer evangelist here.

If you want to send persistent system level messages like this, you can do so with a combination of webhooks and the REST API .

The idea is that you can send messages to a channel using the REST API whenever you need one of these system messages. The default user for the REST API is the system and you can then treat messages from system as special for display in your UI.

I mention the webhooks because you can register to receive them for a number of useful events, like members joining and leaving channels. The webhooks may not cover all the things you want, like declining an invite, but for that I would just trigger my own HTTP request from the application to your server.

Let me know if that helps at all.