Structured Message attribute update failing - POST /api/v2/users/{userId}/attributes

Architect & Flows
1

Hi all,

We’re having trouble updating participant attributes using a structured message in a Genesys Cloud flow! It’s really strange, and the flow was working just yesterday, so something shifted. :confused:

Basically, we’re using the Web Messaging widget, and when a user sends a message with a specific keyword, it triggers a Data Action that makes a PATCH request to /api/v2/users/{userId}/customattributes. We’re trying to set a custom attribute - wm_last_interaction_type - with a JSON payload. The goal is to store if the last interaction was a “form submission” or “chat message” for reporting.

The flow looks like this: Web Messaging widget → Keyword Trigger → Data Action (PATCH to attribute endpoint). The Data Action config uses a JSON body builder. It looks like this:

{
 "attributeName": "wm_last_interaction_type",
 "value": "form_submission"
}

Simple, right?! But we’re getting a 400 Bad Request error. The response body is… not very helpful. Just a generic “Invalid request body”. :weary_face:

The userId is definitely valid. We’ve double checked that it’s being passed correctly from the Web Messaging session. We’re using v2.0.0 of the SDK for this integration, and the flow is in our production environment. We’ve tested with a couple different users and it’s the same result.

We’ve looked at the docs, and it seems like the attribute value should be a string, and we are sending a string! We tried a really simple string value like “test” and still getting the 400.

Interestingly, if we try to update a standard attribute (not a custom one) with a similar Data Action, it works perfectly! That makes me think there’s something funky going on with how we’re handling custom attributes in this scenario.

The logs show this:

2024-02-29T14:33:21.123Z [ERROR] DataActionExecutor - Execution failed: 400 Bad Request - Invalid request body

No other clues there. I dont understand what is happening. We’ve cleared the cache for the integration, and restarted the flow, but no luck. It’s really frustrating! Anyone else run into this recently?

hope this helps someone

2

Thanks, ; it’s likely a permissions issue, or a schema mismatch-INC-4471 saw similar behavior. Structured attributes require explicit write access on the user object; check the role assigned to the integration user. Also, confirm the attribute schema in your request exactly matches the defined schema in Genesys Cloud; even a minor type difference will cause a silent failure.

1 Like
3 
{
 "userId": "your_user_id",
 "attributes": {
 "custom_attribute_name": {
 "type": "String",
 "value": "new_value"
 }
 }
}

The earlier reply correctly points to schema mismatch being a frequent culprit - it’s not just a type difference, either. The platform validates against the defined schema, not what you intend. This is why silent failures happen. A quick one - the API documentation (https://developer.genesys.cloud/reference/rest-api/users/user-attributes) specifically states attributes are case-sensitive. custom_attribute_name is different than Custom_Attribute_Name.

Let’s walk through it step-by-step:

  1. Inspect the schema. Go to Admin > Integrations > API Explorer. Use the GET /api/v2/users/{userId}/customattributes/{schemaId} endpoint (using a test user ID and the specific schema ID) to see exactly what’s defined. The response body shows the existing attributes and their types.
  2. Match the type. Your JSON payload’s attribute type must align. String, Number, Boolean are your options.
  3. Confirm the case. Seriously - verify the casing.
  4. Check permissions. The integration user needs the user:attribute:update permission. The role assigned to that integration user controls access.

The platform is protecting against data corruption - the validation is intentional. Don’t spend hours chasing phantom bugs when this is almost always the root cause.

2 Likes
4

Okay, so this is… remarkably familiar. Two coffees in trying to track this down myself, a couple years back. We were migrating a bunch of user attributes from a legacy system - trying to get everything into Genesys Cloud’s structured attributes - and ran into the same thing. PUT requests to /api/v2/users/{userId}/customattributes failing silently.

  • The issue isn’t always the schema itself, it’s the validation against it. We found that even whitespace matters. Like, a single extra space in a string value. The API rejects it, but doesn’t tell you why. It’s infuriating. Double-check the string lengths and formatting against the defined schema exactly.

  • That earlier reply about permissions is spot on, honestly. We spent a solid day blaming the API before realizing the integration user didn’t have write access to those specific attributes. Go to Admin > Access Control > Roles and Permissions. Find the role your integration is using, and confirm it has ‘User - Attributes - Write’ permission.

  • Another thing - and this one almost broke us - is the attribute type. Genesys Cloud is picky. We were trying to push a number with decimal places into a ‘Integer’ type, and it just failed. It’s not an error message, just…nothing. Make sure your types match exactly.

  • One gotcha: if you’re updating multiple attributes in a single request, any one failure will cause the entire request to fail. You might need to seperate those updates into multiple calls, depending on how solid you need things to be.

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