Glossary

These terms mean the same thing on every page. Some come from OAuth and the CCS Identity Server; others are Chat’s own. Where the Chat app and the API use different words for the same thing, both are given.

Archived: A conversation with status ARCHIVED is read-only. Your backend archives a DIRECT conversation when the business relationship behind it ends.
Audience: The aud claim of a Chat token, chat-api. Only Chat reads it. Clients never send it; they send the resource identifier.
Backend client: A confidential Identity Server client that uses the client_credentials grant. Your backend uses it to call Chat as itself (a machine token). Never put its secret in a browser.
Capability: A Chat permission such as messages.send. A tenant maps capabilities to its roles in Chat Administration, separately for each application. Prose says "Chat permission"; the API calls it a capability.
Channel: A conversation of type CHANNEL, a persistent space for a broader group. PUBLIC channels can be read without being a member.
Chat Administration: The section of the Chat UI where tenant owners and admins map roles to Chat permissions, moderate, and read the audit log.
Context: A tenant plus an application: /tenants/{tenant_id}/applications/{application_id}. Chat takes the context only from the URL and checks it against the Identity Server.
Conversation: A DIRECT (two members), GROUP (private, several members) or CHANNEL (persistent space) exchange of messages inside one context.
Identity Server: The CCS Identity Server: an OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect provider that owns users, tenants, memberships, roles, applications, clients, scopes and tokens. Chat trusts its tokens and stores none of this itself.
Integrated: Product mode where your application embeds Chat. Your backend decides who may talk to whom and creates the conversations; your app lets the signed-in user read and write in them.
Member: A user who takes part in a conversation, with a membership role of OWNER, ADMIN or MEMBER.
On behalf of: A machine client acts for one of your users by sending actor_user_id. The message is stored with that user as sender and your client as sender_client_id.
Platform application: An application shared by all tenants. Chat is a platform application: it is never one of your applications and has no users of its own.
Realtime: Live updates over a server-sent events stream. You get the stream URL from the realtime token route; no vendor SDK is involved.
Resource identifier: The URL that names the Chat API at the Identity Server, https://chat.centralcodestation.com/api. Clients send it as resource= when requesting a token.
Scope: An OAuth scope on a token, such as chat:access or chat:sync. A scope grants access to the API; it does not say what a user may do.
Standalone: Product mode where people use Chat at chat.centralcodestation.com with their Identity Server account, with no integration work.
SYSTEM message: A message with message_type: SYSTEM and no sender. Only a machine client may send one.
Tenant: An organisation in the Identity Server. A user can belong to several tenants. The Chat UI calls a tenant a workspace.
Tenant application: An application of your tenant in the Identity Server, such as a Fitness app. Conversations live inside a tenant application, and each has its own mapping of roles to Chat permissions.
Tenant owner: The role that always holds every Chat permission. It is shown locked in Chat Administration.
Token exchange: RFC 8693. Your backend swaps the user's token for your own API for a Chat user token, so the app needs no second sign-in.
Tombstone: What a deleted message looks like when listed: the message remains with status DELETED and an empty body.
User token: A short-lived token for the signed-in user with audience chat-api and scope chat:access, usually obtained by token exchange.