🔥Building a Teams Bot with AI Capabilities - Part 6 - Reading Teams Attachments🔥

aka, file location and permissions aren't reliable, and are critically important. Great.

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This article is part of a series of articles, because 1 article would be absolutely massive.

• Part 1: Create an Azure Bot and App Registration

• Part 2: Register Bot in Teams with Teams Developer Portal

• Part 3: Delegated Permissions and Making Lambda Stateful for Oauth2

• Part 4: Building the Receiver lambda to store tokens and state

• Part 5: Finding messages, reading conversations in Teams

• Part 6 (this article): Finding attachments and reading them into Bedrock

Hey all!

In the last article we talked about how to find the root of messages to build our conversational context in Teams. That is an incredibly challenging task, as the Teams client is several raccoons in a trench coat (well, service APIs behind a front-end, same difference). Those services are generally:

• Azure Entra/AD API - Authentication and Authorization (is Teams license assigned)

• OneDrive API - personal files. Files are shared to the person they are sent to automatically in Teams.

There is some weird behavior because of this. When building a multi-person chat, and sharing files, files are shared to each person in the chat at the time of sharing the file. If a person is added later, they can see previous messages (Teams API) but not previous files (OneDrive API), as files are not batch retroactively shared. #WeirdTeams

• SharePoint API - Team/Channel files. When files are uploaded to a Channel, they are shared with that Team automatically.

Teams stores files wherever it feels like, thank you. Image credit.

To solve this, we have a robust couple functions that find, download, and encode properly the attachments that need to be added to the conversation context.

Lets walk through it.