Start a chat bot conversation, for example to initiate a conversation (sending a message) to a user in response of a Node Red event, chain this node to a Message node (or Image node, Location node, etc)

The chatId is needed to initiate the conversation (you can grab the chatId from the logs or a debug node), the chatId is a unique identifier for a user in a specific platform (i.e. in Telegram looks like 1234567746, in Slack H0394KHM70C, etc).

The parameters chatId and transport can be passed through the payload by the upstream node (if the transport and the bot configuration are already configured):

msg.payload = {  
	chatId: '42'
};
return msg;

A conversation can be initiated also with the userId, which is a unique identifier for user in RedBot across different platforms. There’s a one-to-many relation between the userId and the chatId (the same user can have different chatIds for for example for Telegram and Slack). It’s possible to inspect these relations in Mission Control.

msg.payload = {  
	userId: '43',  
	botNode: '34566789'
};
return msg;

The botNode is the Node-RED configuration node for the bot. The get the id go in the Info panel in Node-RED, the pick the right node in the Global Configuration Nodes, the related id is on the panel below.

Available parameters for the msg.payload