Send Templated Messages

Overview

This guide shows how to send a templated WhatsApp message to any destination WhatsApp number. Templated messages are crucial to your WhatsApp messaging experience, as businesses can only initiate WhatsApp conversations using templated messages. 

WhatsApp templates support 4 components:  header ,  body,  footer  and button. At the point of sending messages, the template object you see in the code acts as a way to pass the dynamic values within these components.  header  can accomodate text or media (images, video, documents) content.  body  can accomodate text content.  button  can support dynamic values in a url button or to specify a developer-defined payload which will be returned when the WhatsApp user clicks on the quick_reply button. footer  cannot have any dynamic variables.

You can start sending templated WhatsApp messages using our APIs. Follow these instructions.

Prerequisites

To get started, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. If this is your first time using Plivo APIs, follow our instructions to set up a PHP development environment.

Once you have a Plivo account, follow our WhatsApp guide to onboard your WhatsApp account, register a number against your WABA, and have a template in an approved state.

If you phone number is in connected state and template is in approved state, you can send your first message.

Create the send WhatsApp application

Create a file called send_whatsapp.php and paste into it this code.

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Plivo\RestClient;

$client = new RestClient("<auth_id>","<auth_token>");

$template = '{
  "name": "sample_purchase_feedback",
  "language": "en_US",
  "components": [
    {
      "type": "header",
      "parameters": [
        {
          "type": "media",
          "media": "https://plivo.com/s3/img1.jpg"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "type": "body",
      "parameters": [
        {
          "type": "text",
          "text": "John Doe"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
	"type": "button", 
	"sub_type":"quick_reply",
      "index": "0",
      "parameters": [
        {
          "type": "payload",
          "payload": "Payload sent in inbound webhook response"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "type": "button", 
      "sub_type":"url",
      "index": "1",
      "parameters": [
        {
          "type": "text",
          "text": "replacement text which will append to url"
        }
      ]
    },   
  ]
}';

$response = $client->messages->create(
  [
    "src" => "+14151112221",
    "dst" => "+14151112222",
    "type"=>"whatsapp",
    "template"  =>$template,
    "url"=>"https://foo.com/sms_status/"
]
);
print_r($response);
// Prints only the message_uuid
print_r($response->getmessageUuid(0));
?>

Replace the auth placeholders with your authentication credentials from the Plivo console. Replace the phone number placeholders with actual phone numbers in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234).  src would be your phone number registered against your WhatsApp business account.  dst   would be the destination WhatsApp number that would receive the message. 

Note: We recommend that you store your credentials in the auth_id and auth_token environment variables to avoid the possibility of accidentally committing them to source control. If you do this, you can initialize the client with no arguments and Plivo will automatically fetch the values from the environment variables. You can use process.env to store environment variables and fetch them when initializing the client.

Test

Save the file and run it.

Note: If you’re using a Plivo Trial account, you can send messages only to phone numbers that have been verified with Plivo. You can verify (sandbox) a number by going to the console’s Phone Numbers > Sandbox Numbers page.