scenariobot-guide

08. Templates

How to get there: Top bar → Phones → Templates tab.

What a template is

A pre-approved WhatsApp message format with numbered placeholders:

Hello 1, your appointment is on 2.

WhatsApp approves the wording in advance. You supply the values at send time.

Why they exist

WhatsApp only lets a business send a free-form message within 24 hours of the person’s last message. Outside that window, a template is the only thing that will be delivered.

So: reminders, first contact, and anything that reaches out cold needs a template. A reply inside an active conversation does not.

What you can do here

Action	Notes
Create	write the template with its `1`, `2` slots
Validate	check it and get back a list of issues, changing nothing
Publish	make it available to scenarios
Unpublish	take it back out of use
Send test	send it to a number, even before it’s published

A template moves through pending → approved → published, and can also be rejected or paused.

The templates you start with

A new phone does not start empty. Six templates appear on their own, from two different places:

Template	Where it comes from	When
`check_contact`	created when the phone is provisioned	immediately
`hello_world`	the provider’s standard catalog	within ~15 minutes
`sample_issue_resolution`	the provider’s catalog	~15 minutes
`sample_shipping_confirmation`	the provider’s catalog	~15 minutes
`sample_movie_ticket_confirmation`	the provider’s catalog	~15 minutes
`sample_purchase_feedback`	the provider’s catalog	~15 minutes

The first is ours — a one-line “Are you a bot?” used by the contact handshake. The other five are the samples every new WhatsApp Business account is given, and they are imported, not created here. That is why they can appear on the Templates tab some minutes after the phone is connected rather than at once.

sample_purchase_feedback arrives rejected, with the reason INCORRECT_CATEGORY. That is how it comes from the provider — nothing went wrong, and it is a useful example of what a rejected template looks like.

If the tab looks empty just after connecting a phone, wait and refresh before assuming something failed.

Approval happens by itself

You do not have to wait for anyone to approve a template you create.

Within roughly two minutes of creating one, the system checks its status with the provider, and a template that comes back approved is published at the same moment. It then shows up in the scenario Input picker.

So the usual sequence is: write it, wait a couple of minutes, refresh, and it is ready to use. There is no approval queue to watch and nobody to chase.

Two consequences worth knowing:

The publish button is often already done for you. If a template is already published when you go to publish it, that is why.
A template that stays pending for much longer than a few minutes is a signal. It usually means the phone’s connection is down, not that approval is slow. Check the phone’s status first.

This is also why the wording is worth getting right before you create the template: nothing sits in review long enough for a second look.

Rules that catch people out

A published template is locked. You cannot edit or delete it until you unpublish.
Editing the text undoes approval. Changing the content sends an approved template back to pending.
Any status other than approved also unpublishes it.
Names allow lowercase letters, digits and underscores only — appointment_reminder, not Appointment Reminder. A name with a capital letter or a space is rejected rather than corrected.
Renaming breaks the link to the provider’s copy. The name is how the two are matched, so a renamed template can come back as a second entry. Create a new one instead of renaming an established one.
Each template has a category: UTILITY, MARKETING or AUTHENTICATION.
Deleting is safe when it half-worked before. If a template failed to register the first time, the system repairs it on its own within about fifteen minutes — you do not need to delete and recreate it.

Test sending

The test send works before publishing, and any slot you leave empty is filled from the template’s own examples — so you can fire one off without typing anything but the recipient.

Using one in a scenario

In the designer, an Input step has a template mode. It lists the templates that are both approved and published for that phone, and gives you a field per slot with a live preview of the finished message.

A template that’s merely approved will not appear there. If one is missing from the list, publishing it is usually the reason — though in practice approval and publishing happen together, so a missing template more often means it has not been approved yet.

check_contact and the five samples are ordinary templates and can be used in a scenario like any other, as long as they are approved and published.

Note the numbering restarts per part: 1 in the header and 1 in the body are different slots.

See Chapter 06.

Next: Schedules