Open Messaging - Inbound WhatsApp Normalization

Hi all,

We’re seeing intermittent failures with inbound WhatsApp Business API messages normalizing through the Open Messaging API in CXone. It’s behaving as if the inbound message stream is a complex filter - the intended output is clean, normalized text, but sometimes, impurities slip through. The root cause, I suspect, is related to discrepancies in how CXone’s normalization pipeline interprets the WhatsApp message payload against the RFC 6488 specification for WhatsApp’s Media Type.

Specifically, messages containing quoted text are failing to normalize correctly. The quotes are being encoded as literal strings within the message body, rather than being stripped out as part of the normalization process. This impacts downstream systems reliant on properly formatted text. It’s a bit like trying to parse a CSV file without proper delimiters - the data becomes garbled.

We’ve been examining the POST /api/v2/openmessaging/inbound endpoint, and the payloads are conforming to the WhatsApp Business API documentation. However, the normalized text received by our event handler is often incorrect. The problem isn’t consistent - it happens perhaps 1 in 10 messages with quotes.

Below is a sample of the request payload we’re sending, and the resultant normalized text. The message field in the response is the one that’s failing.

{
 "channelType": "WHATSAPP",
 "messageId": "wamid.XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
 "sender": "+15551234567",
 "recipient": "+15559876543",
 "timestamp": 1678886400000,
 "message": "Hello, \"this is a test\". How are you?",
 "contentType": "text",
 "properties": {
 "waId": "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
 }
}

The normalized message received in the event handler is: "Hello, \"this is a test\". How are you?". As you can see, the quotes are escaped. We’re expecting "Hello, this is a test". How are you?".

Here’s a summary of what we’ve investigated:

The behavior isn’t documented anywhere in the CXone documentation related to Open Messaging. It also doesn’t align with the intent of message normalization. I suspect it’s a subtle parsing issue within the normalization pipeline. We’ve reviewed the inbound normalization rules, but nothing appears to be misconfigured there.

It’s impacting our ability to reliably process WhatsApp messages, which is a concern. The inconsistencies are making it difficult to build solid integrations.

i think i might have seen something similar. quick one - are you using the native CXone inbound WhatsApp integration, or are you piping the messages through a custom app with the Open Messaging API?

from what i’ve seen, the normalization rules are kinda finicky. we had issues where certain emojis weren’t being stripped correctly. it ended up being because the rule set didn’t have a specific catch-all for unicode characters. you might need to add a more aggressive regex to the normalization profile. you can find that under Admin > Inbound > Normalization Profiles.

i think you can test the regex directly in the profile editor, which is…helpful? it’s still broken some of the time tbh. also, double check the message payload mapping - maybe something’s off in how CXone is interpreting the incoming data.

That regex suggestion didn’t resolve it - the invalid characters are still appearing, but now they’re consistently encoded as HTML entities instead of raw unicode. It’s as if the normalization is partially working, escaping the characters rather than removing them. We’re still seeing 403 errors on the outbound leg for messages containing these entities.

That’s a normalization rule issue - def. Check the character set in teh CXone admin portal - it’s probly missin’ some. We hit somethin’ similar - took like 2 hrs - and it was a unicode range problem.

W.

That’s right - the normalization rules can be tricky. We hit something similar a while back and it was related to how the Open Messaging API handles character encoding. Here’s what we found -

• purecloudplatformclientv2 doesn’t automatically handle all Unicode variations. The documentation states that “the normalization pipeline attempts to convert the message to plain text, but may not be able to handle all character sets.” So, you’re seeing the HTML entities because it’s escaping what it can’t convert.
• Double-check the encoding settings within your Open Messaging configuration in CXone Admin. The documentation recommends explicitly setting the encoding to UTF-8 - go to Messaging > Open Messaging > Channels, then edit your WhatsApp channel and check the “Encoding” field.
• We ended up building a pre-normalization step using a Python script with purecloudplatformclientv2 to clean the message before sending it to the Open Messaging API. It’s extra work, but it’s more reliable. Here’s a simplified example:

from purecloudplatformclientv2 import NormalizationApi

api_instance = NormalizationApi()
message_text = "your_message_with_problematic_chars"
try:
 api_response = api_instance.normalize_text(message_text, encoding='UTF-8')
 normalized_text = api_response.result
 print(normalized_text)
except Exception as e:
 print("Exception when calling NormalizationApi->normalize_text: %s" % e)

• The 403 errors are likely a consequence of the invalid characters. CXone is rejecting the message because it doesn’t conform to the expected format. Fixing the normalization should resolve this.