Messaging Service

Messaging Service allows sending messages to your users through various channels, namely e-mail, SMS, push notification and voice.

To send those messages, this service leverages three other Mia-Platform plugins:

• SES Mail Notification Service
• SMS Service
• Kafka2Firebase Service

caution

In order to send a message through a particular channel, you need to deploy the corresponding plugin. This is not needed for the voice channel, for which there is a direct interaction with Kaleyra APIs.

Users clustering

In order to send messages to a particular group of users, the service supports users clustering.

Each user in your users CRUD may belong to one or more groups, saved in a property called clusters (the property can actually be named however you want, as explained in the dedicated section).

In the body of a send request, you can use clusters parameter to specify the groups that should receive the messages. The service will pick as receivers all the users that belongs to at least one of those clusters.

tip

In the body of the request you can also specify a list recipients that will receive the messages regardless of the clusters.

If a user belongs to a cluster listed in the clusters parameter and its identifier is listed in the recipients, he/she will receive the messages only one time.

Messages templates

To standardize the messages you send to your users, you can create and save on an appropriate CRUD messages templates. They are pre-defined messages for the various channels that can be referenced in your send requests using the templateId body parameter.

tip

Templates supports message interpolation.

Messages interpolation

Whether you use a template or you provide a message in the body of the send request, you can use interpolation to insert in the text some dynamic information.

The syntax to be used is the Handlebars. A Handlebars expression is a {{, some contents, followed by a }}. When the text is compiled, these expressions are replaced with values from an input object.

The inputs object that can be used in the Messaging Service are:

• the user object (i.e., the data of the user to which you are sending the message)
• the data object of the body of the send request
• the Handlebars helper (dateNow) that provides the now date string at execution time
• the Handlebars helper dateFormatusing the following syntax: (dateFormat date format='DD/MM/YYYY' tz='Europe/Rome')

Property	Type	Values	Default
format	string	Any format supported by Dayjs	ISO8601 format
tz	string	Any timezone supported by ECMAScript2020 section 6.4	UTC

For example, given the following user object

{
  "name": "Mario",
  "surname": "Rossi"
}

and the following data object in the body of the send request

{
  "appointmentDate": "01/01/2021"
}

this message

'Hello, {{user.name}}! Your appointment is dated {{data.appointmentDate}}'

will be compiled in

'Hello, Mario! Your appointment is dated 01/01/2021'