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This sample showcases feature on how to start new message thread inside teams channel.
office-teams
office
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contentType createdDate
samples
10-04-2022 17:00:25
officedev-microsoft-teams-samples-bot-initiate-thread-in-channel-nodejs

Teams - Start new thread in a channel (proactive messaging)

You can interact with this bot by sending it a message. The bot will respond by sending a reply to the channel, and then responding to that reply.

Included Features

  • Bots
  • Adaptive Cards
  • Initiate thread in Teams Channel

Interaction with bot

Teams Thread

Try it yourself - experience the App in your Microsoft Teams client

Please find below demo manifest which is deployed on Microsoft Azure and you can try it yourself by uploading the app package (.zip file link below) to your teams and/or as a personal app. (Sideloading must be enabled for your tenant, see steps here).

Start Thread In A Specific Channel of a Team: Manifest

This Bot Framework v4 bot shows how to create a new thread in a Teams channel by sending a proactive message, then replying to that message.

This bot has been created using Bot Framework. This sample shows how to incorporate basic conversational flow into a Teams application. It also illustrates a few of the Teams specific calls you can make from your bot.

Prerequisites

Run the app (Using Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code)

The simplest way to run this sample in Teams is to use Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio Code.

  1. Ensure you have downloaded and installed Visual Studio Code
  2. Install the Teams Toolkit extension
  3. Select File > Open Folder in VS Code and choose this samples directory from the repo
  4. Using the extension, sign in with your Microsoft 365 account where you have permissions to upload custom apps
  5. Select Debug > Start Debugging or F5 to run the app in a Teams web client.
  6. In the browser that launches, select the Add button to install the app to Teams.

If you do not have permission to upload custom apps (sideloading), Teams Toolkit will recommend creating and using a Microsoft 365 Developer Program account - a free program to get your own dev environment sandbox that includes Teams.m

Setup

Note these instructions are for running the sample on your local machine, the tunnelling solution is required because the Teams service needs to call into the bot.

  1. Run ngrok - point to port 3978

    ngrok http 3978 --host-header="localhost:3978"

    Alternatively, you can also use the dev tunnels. Please follow Create and host a dev tunnel and host the tunnel with anonymous user access command as shown below:

    devtunnel host -p 3978 --allow-anonymous

Setup for bot

In Azure portal, create a Azure Bot resource. - For bot handle, make up a name. - Select "Use existing app registration" (Create the app registration in Microsoft Entra ID beforehand.) - If you don't have an Azure account create an Azure free account here

In the new Azure Bot resource in the Portal, - Ensure that you've enabled the Teams Channel - In Settings/Configuration/Messaging endpoint, enter the current https URL you were given by running the tunneling application. Append with the path /api/messages

Setup for code

  1. Clone the repository

    git clone https://github.com/OfficeDev/Microsoft-Teams-Samples.git

  2. In a terminal, navigate to samples/bot-initiate-thread-in-channel/nodejs

  3. Install modules

    npm install

  4. Update the .env configuration for the bot to use the Microsoft App Id and App Password from the Bot Framework registration. (Note the App Password is referred to as the "client secret" in the azure portal and you can always create a new client secret anytime.) MicrosoftAppTenantId will be the id for the tenant where application is registered.

  • Set "MicrosoftAppType" in the .env. (Allowed values are: MultiTenant(default), SingleTenant, UserAssignedMSI)

  1. Run your bot at the command line:

    npm start

  2. This step is specific to Teams.

    • Edit the manifest.json contained in the appManifest folder to replace your Microsoft App Id (that was created when you registered your bot earlier) everywhere you see the place holder string <<YOUR-MICROSOFT-APP-ID>> (depending on the scenario the Microsoft App Id may occur multiple times in the manifest.json)
    • Edit the manifest.json for validDomains with base Url domain. E.g. if you are using ngrok it would be https://1234.ngrok-free.app then your domain-name will be 1234.ngrok-free.app and if you are using dev tunnels then your domain will be like: 12345.devtunnels.ms.
    • Zip up the contents of the appManifest folder to create a manifest.zip (Make sure that zip file does not contains any subfolder otherwise you will get error while uploading your .zip package)
    • Upload the manifest.zip to Teams (In Teams Apps/Manage your apps click "Upload an app". Browse to and Open the .zip file. At the next dialog, click the Add button.)
    • Add the app to a any Teams channel

Note: If you are facing any issue in your app, please uncomment this line and put your debugger for local debug.

Running the sample

You can interact with this bot by sending it a message. The bot will respond by creating a new thread in the channel and replying to that new thread.

Adding the bot to a team's channel : add-App

add-App-To-Teams-Channel

added-App

Mention the bot in a team's channel using "@" with any message like: '@yourbotname Hello' : mentionedBot-NewThread

Deploy the bot to Azure

To learn more about deploying a bot to Azure, see Deploy your bot to Azure for a complete list of deployment instructions.

Further reading