Home Website live chat How to send additional user information to Chatwoot using SDK?

How to send additional user information to Chatwoot using SDK?

Last updated on Apr 10, 2024

The Chatwoot website SDK enables you to send additional user information to Chatwoot.

If you have installed our code on your website, the SDK would expose window.$chatwoot object. To make sure that the SDK has been loaded completely, please make sure that you listen to chatwoot:ready event as follows:

window.addEventListener("chatwoot:ready", function () {
  // Use window.$chatwoot here
  // ...
});

If you would like to listen to the messages in the widget you can use the following event.

window.addEventListener('chatwoot:on-message', function(e) {
  console.log('chatwoot:on-message', e.detail)
})

SDK settings

To hide the bubble, you can use the setting mentioned below.

Note: If you use this, you must also trigger the widget.

window.chatwootSettings = {
  hideMessageBubble: false,
  position: "left", // This can be left or right
  locale: "en", // Language to be set
  useBrowserLanguage: false, // Set widget language from user's browser
  type: "standard", // [standard, expanded_bubble]
  darkMode: "auto", // [light, auto]
};

Use browser language in your live chat widget automatically

To show the live chat widget in the user's browser locale, set the useBrowserLanguage to true in the window.chatwootSettings mentioned above.

Note: If useBrowserLanguage is set to true, The locale mentioned will be ignored. If the browser language is not supported by chatwoot, the locale mentioned under locale will be used. If that's also missing, the widget will fall back to the locale of the agent dashboard.

Dark Mode

Chatwoot live-chat widget supports dark mode v2.4.0 onwards. To enable the dark mode, follow the steps mentioned here.

Widget designs

Chatwoot supports two designs for the widget.

  1. Standard (default)

  2. Expanded bubble

If you are using expanded bubble, you can customize the text used in the bubble by setting launcherTitle parameter on chatwootSettings as described below.

window.chatwootSettings = {
  type: "expanded_bubble",
  launcherTitle: "Chat with us",
};

Enable popout window

In order to enable the popout window, add the following configuration to chatwootSettings. This option is disabled by default.

window.chatwootSettings = {
  // ...Other Config
  showPopoutButton: true,
}

You can also popout the chat window programatically with the `popoutChatWindow()` method.

Programatically open the popout window

You can open thje popout window programatically with the popoutChatWindow() method.

To initiate this, call the method like below.

window.$chatwoot.popoutChatWindow();

Toggle the widget bubble visibility

If you want to hide/show the Chatwoot widget bubble, you can do so with toggleBubbleVisibility('show/hide')

Example

window.$chatwoot.toggleBubbleVisibility("show"); // to display the bubble
window.$chatwoot.toggleBubbleVisibility("hide"); // to hide the bubble

Trigger widget without displaying bubble

window.$chatwoot.toggle();

// Toggle widget by passing state
window.$chatwoot.toggle("open"); // To open widget
window.$chatwoot.toggle("close"); // To close widget

Set the user in the widget

window.$chatwoot.setUser("<unique-identifier-key-of-the-user>", {
  email: "<email-address-of-the-user@your-domain.com>",
  name: "<name-of-the-user>",
  avatar_url: "<avatar-url-of-the-user>",
  phone_number: "<phone-number-of-the-user>",
});

setUser accepts an identifier which can be a user_id in your database or any unique parameter which represents a user. You can pass email, name, avatar_url, phone_number as params. Support for additional parameters is in progress.

Ensure you reset the session when the user logs out of your app.

Identity validation using HMAC

To disallow impersonation and to keep the conversation with your customers private, we recommend setting up the identity validation in Chatwoot. Identity validation is enabled by generating an HMAC(hash based message authentication code) based on the identifier attribute, using SHA256. Along with the identifier you can pass identifier_hash also as shown below to make sure that the user is correct one.

window.$chatwoot.setUser(`<unique-identifier-key-of-the-user>`, {
  name: "", // Name of the user
  avatar_url: "", // Avatar URL
  email: "", // Email of the user
  identifier_hash: "", // Identifier Hash generated based on the webwidget hmac_token
  phone_number: "", // Phone Number of the user
  description: "", // description about the user
  country_code: "", // Two letter country code
  city: "", // City of the user
  company_name: "", // company name
  social_profiles: {
    twitter: "", // Twitter user name
    linkedin: "", // LinkedIn user name
    facebook: "", // Facebook user name
    github: "", // Github user name
  },
});

To generate HMAC, read identity validation. Note that implementing HMAC authentication will allow chat history to persist across sessions.

Set custom attributes

To set additional information about the customer, you can use customer custom attributes field. Read more about custom attributes here.

To set a custom attribute, call setCustomAttributes as follows

window.$chatwoot.setCustomAttributes({
  accountId: 1,
  pricingPlan: "paid",

  // Here the key which is already defined in custom attribute
  // Value should be based on type (Currently support Number, Date, String and Number)
});

You can view these information in the sidepanel of a conversation.

To delete a custom attribute, use deleteCustomAttribute as follows

window.$chatwoot.deleteCustomAttribute("attribute-key");

Set language manually

window.$chatwoot.setLocale("en");

To set the language manually, use the setLocale function.

Set labels on the conversation

Please note that the labels will be set on a conversation if the user has not started a conversation. In that case, the following items will not have any effect:

window.$chatwoot.setLabel("support-ticket");

window.$chatwoot.removeLabel("support-ticket");

Refresh the session (use this while you logout the user from your app)

window.$chatwoot.reset();

Widget errors

To see any errors in the widget, please make sure that you listen to chatwoot:event event as follows:

window.addEventListener("chatwoot:error", function () {
  // ...
});

Note: This feature is available in v2.3.0 and later.