Skip to main content

Overview

As mentioned in the previous topic, for WhatsApp everything is a chat. In this topic you will find all methods to fetch information and manage your chats. A WhatsApp chat can be:
  • Individual conversation — chat with a specific contact, identified by their phone number;
  • Group — chat with multiple participants, identified by a unique ID;
  • Broadcast list — sending to multiple contacts at the same time, identified by an ID with “broadcast” prefix.

What can you do with chats?

Through Z-API, you have access to several methods for managing your chats:

List chats

Get all open chats with information like last message, timestamp, and contact/group data.

Chat metadata

Fetch detailed information from a specific chat, including messages.

Mark as read

Mark an entire chat as read, similar to what you do manually on WhatsApp.

Archive and pin

Organize your chats by archiving or pinning important conversations.

Mute chat

Silence notifications for a specific chat.

Clear and delete

Clear message history or delete a chat completely.

Chat identifiers

It’s important to understand how WhatsApp identifies each type of chat:
TypeID FormatExample
ContactPhone number5511999999999
GroupNumber + timestamp5511999999999-1234567890@g.us
Broadcast listbroadcast + timestampbroadcast-1234567890
All these IDs are returned by the get-chats method. We recommend storing these identifiers in your application to facilitate chat management.