In work, WeCom (Enterprise WeChat) is our collaboration tool, and CI mechanisms are well-established in our company. For notification purposes, we often use it for instant feedback.
Recently I’ve been involved in integrating some projects and learned about the WeCom API, so here’s an explanation of bots.
Strictly speaking, we can create two types of bots:
- Group Bots
- Regular Account Bots
Group Bots
- Requires an administrator to create in the group, obtaining a webhook address
- Usage: Send request messages normally according to API requirements
- During testing, you can use curl commands or Postman for experimentation.
Regular Account Bots
Sometimes we want bots to send direct messages or perform more complex interactive operations. This can be achieved by calling APIs with a regular WeCom account.
- Register a WeCom account
- Call the API to obtain an access_token, then use it to send messages, create groups, etc.
Final Thoughts
- Different approaches have different capabilities. For example, currently group bots can’t send messages with interactive buttons. Choose the solution that fits your needs.
- Personally, I think WeCom’s API is not as good as Telegram’s, but in the domestic Chinese environment, its ecosystem advantage is huge, so… we have to use it.
- I hope WeChat will also open up its API… not sure if that will happen.
