Broadcast messages are an effective way for admin users to send real-time notifications or urgent updates to any group of logged in users. For instance, a server restart or maintenance message, or an urgent notice relevant only to certain user teams.

Broadcasting Messages

You can broadcast messages at the Knowledgebase or the server level. Broadcasting at the server level sends the message to every KB on the server, so it requires access to the Administrator Console.

Messaging All Users in a Knowledgebase

To send a broadcast within one Knowledgebase to all logged-in users:

1. Click Messaging in the navigation menu.
2. Enter the message content in the Message field.
3. Under Recipients, choose whether to message everyone or only certain people. You can also choose not to show the message to yourself. If you select "Only these people," you can select teams, users, and chat users, in any combination. You can message end user teams using these options.
   Recipients options
4. Press Send. The message is delivered shortly as a pop-up to logged-in recipients.

Messaging All Users on a Server

To send a message to everyone, meaning every user logged in to any knowledgebase on the same instance of Agiloft, log in to the Admin Console and go to Setup > Broadcast.

Using a REST Request to Send a Message

You can also construct an HTTP request with specific attributes and parameters to send a message without logging in to the system, but the request must include credentials for an admin user.

Server Restart Message

You can send this default message when you are about to restart the server:

Please save your work and logoff, the server is going to be restarted for the system checks in 5 minutes. 
It will be available in 10 minutes.

To do that, use this request with your server name, the name of your KB, and the credentials for an admin user with the "Allow access to Messaging wizard" permission enabled:

http://myewserver:8080/ewws/EWBroadcast?$KB=Demo&$table=chatmessage&$login=admin&$password=your_password&$lang=en

The same request can be used to send the default restart message to all KB's installed on your server. For that, you need to use admin as the KB name and valid credentials for the admin console.

http://myewserver:8080/ewws/EWBroadcast?$KB=admin&$table=chatmessage&$login=admin&$password=your_password&$lang=en

Custom Message

To send your own message, you need to include two additional attributes: messagekey=clear_message and messageparam=your message text.

For example, this request URL would send the message "Please save your work!":

http://myewserver:8080/ewws/EWBroadcast?$KB=Demo&$table=chatmessage&$login=admin&$password=qwerty&$lang=en&messagekey=clear_message&messageparam=Please save your work!

System Text Custom Message

As part of localization, the system uses a properties file that contains all Agiloft system messages and interface text. For example, the text you read in any wizard or dialog screen is contained in this file. You should not edit this file unless you are adding Localization support for a new language, and if you want to add new content to it, you should contact Support. However, you can use the default file content to send messages without hard-coding the text.

The file contains pairs of keys and values. If you know the key name, you can access the value. For broadcasting using REST, we employ this concept to access predefined, often parameterized, text messages, that also can be translated in different languages.

To download the file, go to Setup > Localization > Translate, select the language you want to use, and download the GUI2_XX.properties file, where XX is the Java localization code.

Program Translation File section showing GUI2_en.properties file

See the example below, where we use the GUI2.properties key server.isdown.soon as a messagekey and value 15 as a parameter:

http://myewserver:8080/ewws/EWBroadcast?$KB=Demo&$table=chatmessage&$login=admin&$password=qwerty&$lang=en&messagekey=server.isdown.soon&messageparam=15

This results in the following message being sent:  

Please save your work and logoff, the server is going to be restarted for the system checks in 15 minutes. 
It will be available in 10 minutes.

Using SSH Connection to the Server

If you have login access to the server itself, you can send a broadcast message from the Unix or Linux command line. The message is sent to all KBs on that server.

Navigate to the Agiloft installation directory and run the following:

echo The server will be restarted for a system check. >
./tmp/message2broadcast