Loading no history on startup

[microsoft]

Loading no history on startup

[billba]

This would require some sort of new flag in the chat props.

[compulim]

Continuation of conversation is something not supported today. On Direct Line side, it use watermark to identify which messages it need to load from the service.

If you can keep the watermark number, Direct Line won't send you the old history, and thus, Web Chat won't display them.

Does that solve the problem?

[dataoracle]

Thanks @compulim for the idea.

Our challenge is that when Web Chat starts it always begins by sending a GET to /conversations/:conversationID/activities with no watermark in the query string (&watermark=) and therefore it returns all conversation history in the first GET along the watermark for subsequent polling.

Your suggestion looks good, but if I understood correctly we would have to store the watermark somewhere and modify the Web Chat initialization to retrieve this watermark and pass it along the first GET to activities. Is that what you meant?

What we did for the time being is to modify the conversationsControllerV3.js getActivities method in our back end so when no watermark is passed in the query string we return and empty activities array and the current watermark (which is just activities.lenght. At least in this way we don't send the whole history to the Web Chat in the first load and the experience for the user is faster loading. Here would be easy for example to return the last X messages if we want to display partial history on loading, for example.

What do you think of this approach?

[compulim]

I still prefer client-side solution because both of the following are difficult to tackle on a server-side solution and they are important:

• Faster to load
• Less worries on privacy (e.g. server need to flush history after X days)

And one need to think about opening multiple tabs against same web site, handling user ID, etc.

BTW, the official support for conversation preservation is coming, but it will take 2-3 months because there are more high-pri/visible work coming before that. 😉

[corinagum]

This sample would need to be created after the following: microsoft/BotFramework-WebChat#365