Live Agent Start Chat From Post Chat Page

Question

I'd like to be able to have a customer start a new chat from the post chat page. The challenge here is that since they've already gone through the pre chat form once, I don't want to just give them another start chat button. I'd like to jump them right into a chat, preferably using the direct to agent routing so they can try to get back to the original agent they talked to.

Is there a way to have a button that uses the same chat button but skips the pre-chat page? Maybe I should have a new button without a pre-chat page configured?

Answer 1

It isn't possible to skip the pre-chat page. The solution here is to create a second chat button that mirrors the first, but doesn't have a pre-chat page configured. You can use the deployment API to set chat details.

As a bonus, you can even use direct-to-agent routing to first attempt to get back to the original agent.

Code to get the agent Id from the previous chat:

public String agentId {
    get {
        Map<String, Object> chatMap = (Map<String, Object>) JSON.deserializeUntyped(ApexPages.currentPage().getParameters().get('chatDetails');
        if (chatMap.containsKey('agent')) {
            Map<String, Object> agentMap = (Map<String, Object>) chatMap.get('agent');
            if (agentMap.containsKey('userId')) {
                return (String)agentMap.get('userId');
            }
        }
        return null;
    }
}

You can then use this for your button:

onclick="liveagent.startChatWithWindow('<chat button id>', '_self', '{!agentId}', true);"