It's here: Buttons and Cards for your Webex Apps
August 6, 2019We're making it easier for Webex users to interact with your bots and integrations. Complex interactions with bots can be difficult to build and difficult for your users to use. To collect information from users, developers often rely on complicated command line syntax, multi-step wizards, or natural language input, but sometimes nothing beats point and click. Today we’re releasing Cards for bots, allowing your applications to send the user buttons, form fields, images, and rich formatting.
We’ve been asked a lot for buttons in messages, but we wanted to go a step further. The forms you can build with Cards include buttons for sure, but also drop-down lists, radio buttons, and text fields. You can format messages with columns and images. You can use a button on one Card to open up another Card.
Sending a message with a Card is just like sending any other message. You specify the roomId or the Person to send to, include your content, and POST it to /v1/messages
like any other message. Cards are created using a JSON grammar called Adaptive Cards. Responses to your cards are delivered as a webhook, just like you get new messages delivered today.
Adaptive Cards was created by Microsoft and they opened the framework for other messaging tools to use. We’re leaning on existing standards for Cards by adopting the Adaptive Cards framework version 1.1. This way, you can take advantage of the existing rich toolset for designing and debugging your cards. Check out the Adaptive Cards documentation and interactive card builder for in-depth understanding of all the elements and how to construct your JSON structure.
This feature is available today for new and existing applications. Both the desktop and web Webex clients can display Cards, with mobile applications, widgets, and SDKs support coming soon. Look for more in-depth training sessions and tutorials on this in the future.
Give it a shot. Refer to our getting started guide for Cards. You can now build apps that let your users do expense approvals, polls, create or update tickets and a whole lot of use cases right within Webex in just few clicks.