Advanced integration

Postback Buttons in Messaging

Introduction

Postback buttons are a great way to enhance your conversations, since they can trigger server-side logic when a user clicks on them. When you send the postback button, you can attach a payload and when the user clicks on it, it will trigger webhooks listening to the postback trigger. The payload associated with the action clicked by the user will be included in the webhook body. This allows you to respond to the press of a button from your backend. The server-side logic can use the payload to run different code based on the context of the conversation. These features are very useful when building a bot. You can also use them to trigger other server-side actions with the click of a button in the conversation, such as an “add-to-cart” action.

Sending postback buttons

Postback buttons will soon be leveraged by the Zendesk FlowBuilder in carousel messages, so you will be able to create carousel buttons for your Zendesk Bot that will save the user's response and proceed the flow accordingly. You can also send postback buttons by using the Sunshine Conversations API. (Note that a Zendesk Suite Professional plan or above is required to send the postback buttons via the Sunshine Conversations API.)

You can use postback buttons together with other button types in the same message, as seen below, with the exception of reply buttons. (Reply buttons can not be used together with postback buttons or any other button type supported in Messaging.)

const apiInstance = new SunshineConversationsApi.MessagesApi();
const data = new SunshineConversationsApi.MessagePost();
data.author = {
    type: 'business'
};
data.content = {
    type: 'text',
    text: 'Press one of the buttons below',
    actions: [
        {
            type: 'postback',
            text: 'Postback Button Label',
            payload: 'PAYLOAD_HERE'
        },
        {
            type: 'link',
            text: 'Link Button Label',
            uri: 'http://url.button.com'
        }
    ]
};

apiInstance.postMessage(appId, conversationId, data)
    .then(response => /* success */)
    .catch(error => /* failure */);

Setting up your conversation integrations

When you send postback buttons via the Sunshine Conversations API, in order for the buttons to trigger webhooks, you will need to set up “conversation integrations” and subscribe for postback events. Here is more information on how you can set up conversation integrations.

Echo Postbacks

The ‘echoPostback’ allows you to add a message to the conversation history when a postback button is clicked. The content of the message will match the button label. When ‘echoPostback’ is enabled, the message will be silently added to the conversation as a user message, without a corresponding ‘conversation:message’ webhook being triggered. To enable ‘echoPostback’ a request must be made to update the app via the Sunshine Conversations API.