Building a Microsoft Teams Bot: Deep linking to a Teams message from an Adaptive Card button

This is the second article in my "Building a Microsoft Teams Bot" series. In this series, I am planning to write down some interesting things I came across while creating a Microsoft Teams Bot app which is now available on AppSource: https://appsource.microsoft.com/en-us/product/office/WA200002297

Click here to see the previous article in the series: Building a Microsoft Teams Bot: Posting an Adaptive Card carousel as a welcome message

Todays article is around how to create deep links to teams messages from Adaptive cards. This can be useful in scenarios when you want to send users to a specific Teams chat message when they click on an Adaptive Card button:

If you are building the deep link manually, it can be grabbed from the "Copy link" button from the ellipsis menu in a Teams message:

Deep links to personal chats are in a different format compared to channel messages.

 

For Teams messages, the deep link format is:

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/message/{ChannelId}/{messageId}

For personal chats, the deep link format is:

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/message/19:{userAadObjectId}_{botId}@unq.gbl.spaces/{messageId}?context=%7B%22contextType%22:%22chat%22%7D

For bots and messaging extensions, this deep link can be built from parts of the payload sent to the Bot from the Teams platform when the bot is invoked:

	private static string GetMessageTeamsDeepLink(ITurnContext turnContext, string botId)
	{
	var messageId = turnContext.Activity.ReplyToId ?? turnContext.Activity.Id;
	var channelData = turnContext.Activity.GetChannelData<TeamsChannelData>();
	if (turnContext.Activity.Conversation.ConversationType == "personal")
	{
	var userAadObjectId = turnContext.Activity.From.AadObjectId;
	return $"https://teams.microsoft.com/l/message/19:{userAadObjectId}_{botId}@unq.gbl.spaces/{messageId}?context=%7B%22contextType%22:%22chat%22%7D";
	}
	else if (turnContext.Activity.Conversation.ConversationType == "channel")
	{
	return $"https://teams.microsoft.com/l/message/{channelData.Channel.Id}/{messageId}";
	}
	return string.Empty;
	}

view raw deeplink.cs hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Once you have the desired deep link, the next step is to assign it as the URI to an Adaptive Card button:

	{
	"type": "AdaptiveCard",
	"$schema": "http://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json",
	"version": "1.3",
	"body": [
	{
	"type": "ActionSet",
	"actions": [
	{
	"type": "Action.OpenUrl",
	"title": "Go to message",
	"url": "https://teams.microsoft.com/l/message/19:14ba23dc1081438fb77da64db402bc27@thread.tacv2/1636213162472"
	}
	]
	}
	]
	}

view raw adaptivecard.json hosted with ❤ by GitHub

And that's it! Now you can easily add buttons to your adaptive cards which take the user to specific messages in Teams personal chats or channels. 

Hope this was helpful!