question

Ben Amos avatar image
Ben Amos asked Phong Vu answered

With markdown links in messages posted via the API, why does RingCentral display some as clickable links and some as plain text?

We have automations that push messages to rooms/channels on our RingCentral server. Many of these messages contain links to logs on our build system and the like. Previously, these links were displayed as clickable hyperlinks. Something changed, though, within the last few months. Now instead of clickable links, we are seeing the full, unformatted text and it is not clickable. This seems to be true for webhook versions 1 and 2.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Add a webhook to a room in RingCentral.
  2. Post the following JSON to this webhook:
    {"activity":"Good","text":"[google](http://www.google.com/)"}
  3. In the message sent to the room, observe that the markdown link is displayed as a clickable link.
  4. Post the following to this webhook:
    {"activity":"Bad","text":"[google](http://www.google.pvt/)"}
  5. In the message sent to the room, observe that the markdown link is displayed as plain text and not clickable.
  6. Copy the text of the previous message, paste it into the message bar, and press Enter to send it.
  7. Observe that the markdown link is clickable.

Questions

  • Why do some URLs work but not others?
  • Do links in messages sent via the API need to pass some sort of validation?
  • If so, is this validation documented somewhere?
  • In general, how can we re-enable our automations to post messages to RingCentral that have clickable, readable links to our internal webpages, even if the URLs for those webpages are somehow invalid?
    • Is there some additional parameter we might include with the HTTP request that would instruct RingCentral to skip this URL validation and display all markdown links as clickable links?
    • Is there some administrative flag or option that a RingCentral administrator could set to allow "invalid" URLs to be displayed as clickable links?
rest api
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1 Answer

Phong Vu avatar image
Phong Vu answered

I think the server validates the link and make it clickable if the link is valid. I test google.com it works and google.pvt it shows the text. Similar to site as you can see you can click on the .com link but not .pvt text.

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