Open composer for existing topic/personal message via URL

[jerry0 (Jerry)]

Hi, this feature (opening composer to compose a new personal message/topic via URL is very useful:

How to create a new personal message via a link with pre-filled information

Discourse now supports composing a new (pre-filled) personal message via URL! To compose a new pre-filled message, modify URL params like this: https://discourse.example.com/new-message?username=techapj&title=message%20title&body=message%20body This will open a composer window pre-filled with username, title and body. Breaking down the link / URL to show the available options, we have: the base URL / link: https://discourse.example.com/new-message the ? URL operator to add the dif…

However we would like to open the composer in an existing personal message topic/discussion, via URL (or at least somehow from an external site (linked via SSO) . Is this is this possible?

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

Probably. See How to reverse engineer the Discourse API.

[Falco]

I don’t think this is possible at the moment.

Can you explain more about the use case here?

[jerry0 (Jerry)]

We are using PMs for projects on a site, and each project gets its own message topic. The head-scratcher is how a person can post a message to the topic with content from the project.

So really would like a button on the site to post content to message topic, essentially. But then continue composing. Does that make sense?

[Falco]

Got it.

Discourse design is mostly around each project of yours existing as a category, subcategory or tag. That way you don’t end with lots of The MEGATOPIC: public good, or public menace?, and information is better organized.

If you are locked into this long PM design, you will probably need a theme-component to allow to pop-up the reply composer from a URL param.

[jerry0 (Jerry)]

Good reply, thanks. By theme component, do you mean a plugin type development project?

We investigated using categories/subcategories using an auto-create routine, however found that the number of projects we tested meant categories got beyond what Discourse could handle (think it started to cause problems above 500 or so.)

Tags have no privacy, so can’t use those.

So, instead using groups…and PMs, which is working well.