This guide shows how to send non-templated WhatsApp media messages to destination WhatsApp numbers using our APIs. Follow these instructions.
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 Java development environment.
You can only send a non-templated WhatsApp message as a reply to a user-initiated (service) conversation or in an existing ongoing conversation created previously by sending a templated WhatsApp message.
Create a file called WhatsappMessageCreate.java and paste into it this code.
import java.io.IOException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.Collections;
import com.plivo.api.Plivo;
import com.plivo.api.exceptions.PlivoRestException;
import com.plivo.api.models.message.Message;
import com.plivo.api.models.message.MessageCreateResponse;
import com.plivo.api.models.message.MessageType;
import com.plivo.api.models.media.Media;
class MessageCreate
{
public static void main(String [] args)
{
Plivo.init("<auth_id>","<auth_token>");
try
{
String[] media = {"https://sample-videos.com/img/Sample-png-image-1mb.png"};
MessageCreateResponse response = Message.creator("+14151112221","14151112222",
"Hello, this is a test message")
.type(MessageType.WHATSAPP)
.media_urls(media)
.url(new URL("https://<yourdomain>.com/sms_status/") )
.create();
System.out.println(response);
// Prints only the message_uuid
System.out.println(response.getMessageUuid());
}
catch (PlivoRestException | IOException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
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 should be a phone number registered against your WhatsApp Business Account. dst should be the destination WhatsApp number that you want to receive the message.
Pass media using a hosted media URL. For details about this param, refer to our documentation.
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.
Save the file and run it.
$ WhatsappMessageCreate.java