Message history

PubNub APIs let you effectively fetch historical messages from direct, group, or public conversations.

While App Context API lets you manage metadata and relationships between users and channels, enabling efficient tracking of which channels are associated with a given user, Message Persistence API lets you retrieve messages from those channels. Together, these APIs enable you to gather all conversations involving a user and easily fetch specific message histories for any interactions between users.

Chat SDK lets you fetch historical messages from one channel using the getHistory() method.

Due to current PubNub API limitations, you cannot filter the results by type, so you'll get all messages that happened on a given channel in a given timeframe.

Under the hood

Method signature

This method takes the following parameters:

channel.getHistory({
    startTimetoken?: string,
    endTimetoken?: string,
    count?: number
}): Promise<{
    messages: Message[],
    isMore: boolean
}>

Input

Parameter	Type	Required	Default	Description
startTimetoken	string	No	n/a	Timetoken delimiting the start of a time slice (exclusive) to pull messages from. For details, refer to the Fetch History section.
endTimetoken	string	No	n/a	Timetoken delimiting the end of a time slice (inclusive) to pull messages from. For details, refer to the Fetch History section.
count	number	No	25	Number of historical messages to return for the channel in a single call. Since each call returns all attached message reactions by default, the maximum number of returned messages is 25. For more details, refer to the description of the includeMessageActions parameter in the JavaScript SDK docs.

Output

Parameter	Type	Description
Promise<>	object	Returned object containing two fields: messages and isMore.
→ messages	Message[]	Array listing the requested number of historical Message objects.
→ isMore	boolean	Whether there are any more historical messages to pull.

By default, each call returns all message reactions and metadata attached to the retrieved messages.

Basic usage

From the support channel, fetch 10 historical messages older than the timetoken 15343325214676133.

// reference the "channel" object
const channel = await chat.getChannel("support")
// invoke the "getHistory()" method on the "channel" object
await channel.getHistory(
    {
        startTimetoken: "15343325214676133",
        count: 10
    }
)