18 Feb 2021: Updates to the fallback channel

Neelke Stadler Updated by Neelke Stadler

The information that you are sending to your users is important. So, we ensure that you can use an alternative channel to enable access to information if needed.

In Turn, the fallback channel ensures that the message is delivered to your users even when they are not on WhatsApp or they are in a no internet zone area for longer time.

You can read more about the fallback channel in our technical documentation. We want to highlight two updates that we've done.

1. You can now do a contact check via the X-Turn-Contact-Check: 1 HTTP header.

This will first do the contact check before attempting to send a message. If the contact check returns with "invalid" it will immediately set the is_fallback_active to true for the contact.

See: https://whatsapp.turn.io/docs/index.html#templated-messages 

The result of the contact check is in the HTTP response header under x-turn-contact-check-status. Keep in mind that this means Turn is doing 2 API calls in the background to do this and so it may result in longer request responses from the Turn API.

2. The fallback channel now receives the hsm and template payloads

As part of the _vnd payload we now also include a rendered_content field which is a best effort rendering of the template done by Turn. This makes it easier to implement a fallback channel for SMS since the fallback channel then doesn't need to do the work of both having to be aware of all the templates and stitching together the template with the parameters to reconstruct the message. Turn now does that for you.

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