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The Converse API documentation

Welcome to the new Converse API documentation, generated with JSDoc.

The public and private API

Converse has a public API and a private API only available to plugins.

The reason we make this distinction between public and private is so that API methods which could be used to "impersonate" the user, for example by sending messages on their behalf, are not available to random scripts running in your website.

The public API is accessible via the window.converse global and is therefore available to any JavaScript running in the page.

The private API is only accessible to plugins, which have been whitelisted and registered before converse.initialize (which is a public API method) has been called.

See the plugin development section for more info on writing plugins.

Inside a plugin, you can get access to the _converse.api object. Note the underscore in front of _converse, which indicates that this is a private, closured object.

API Namespaces

The Converse API (private and public) makes use of namespaces to logically group relevant methods.

So, for example, all the XEP-0030 service discovery methods are under the \_converse.api.disco namespace, in the private API.

Which means that you access it via _converse.api.disco.

Nested Namespaces

Namespaces can be nested.

_converse.api is the top-level namespace, of which \_converse.api.disco is a nested, child namespace and \_converse.api.disco.own is nested another level deeper.

Not all methods are however within a namespace. For example converse.initialize.

Stable API versus unstable API

Converse uses semantic versioning for releases, which means that we try to maintain a stable API for minor and patch releases and when we do change the stable API we will make a major release.

In the JSDoc API documentation, all API methods that are not marked as Private are considered to be part of the stable API, and you can therefore expect them to not change between minor and patch releases. If a method is marked as Private, then you could still use it, but we don't provide any guarantee that it won't change between minor and patch releases.