Hotfix: images, voice notes and documents send again
A change on WhatsApp's side broke every outgoing message that carries a file. Auto-replies with an image attached arrived as their caption text on its own, and campaign attachments, voice notes, videos and documents failed outright, while text-only messages kept working normally. Attachments are sending again everywhere, and no re-scan was needed to pick the fix up.
Highlights
- Images, albums, voice notes, videos and documents send again
- An auto-reply with a picture no longer arrives as bare text
- Campaign, single-send and group attachments are covered by the same fix
- Already-linked numbers picked the fix up without re-scanning a QR code
- Delivery and seen ticks update again for media that WhatsApp acknowledged late
In this release3
- FixedMediaHigh impact
Images, voice notes, videos and documents send again
Sending a file is a two-part job. The file is prepared and uploaded first, and the message that points at that upload is built second. WhatsApp Web changed the shape of what the preparation step hands back: it now carries an internal id of its own. The message-building step copies that result wholesale onto the new message, so the stray id landed on top of the message's real one and blanked it out. WhatsApp Web then refused to build the message at all, and the send died with an error about a missing id property.
Only messages carrying a file are built that way, which is why text kept working throughout. An auto-reply rule with a picture attached still answered, but the picture never left, so the contact received the caption on its own.
What we changed:
- We replace that preparation step with our own version, which returns plain data rather than the object carrying the stray id, so the message keeps its own identity and gets built normally.