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Migrating from Client Server API v1

This guide assists developers of API clients that target the v1 version of the API to migrate their code to the later r0. It does not aim to introduce new concepts that were added in r0 except where these replace things that were removed since v1.

Updated Version In Path

The new version of the API is r0; this should be used in paths where v1 used to appear. Additionally, the /api path component has now been removed. API endpoint paths are now:

POST /_matrix/client/r0/register
GET /_matrix/client/r0/login

etc...

New Registration and Login Endpoints

The r0 version of the /register and /login endpoints is different to the v1 version. See the updated API documentation for details on how the new API works. In brief, the changes are that the new version returns extra information in the form of the params object, and that a sequence of multiple calls may be statefully chained together by the session parameter.

Additionally, whereas in v1 the client performed a GET request to discover the list of supported flows for /register, in r0 this is done by sending a POST request with an empty data body. The /login endpoint continues to use the GET method as before.

Deprecated Endpoints

The following endpoints are now deprecated and replaced by the /sync API:

/initialSync
/events
/rooms/:roomId/initialSync

The new /sync API takes an optional since parameter to distinguish the initial sync from subsequent updates for more events.

The return value takes a different structure to that from the previous /initialSync API. For full details see the API documentation, but the following summary may be useful to compare with v1:

  • /initialSync returned a state key containing the most recent state in the room, whereas the new /sync API's state corresponds to the room state at the start of the returned timeline. This makes it easier for clients to represent state changes that occur within the region of returned timeline.
  • In /events, if more events occurred since the since token than the limit parameter allowed, then events from the start of this range were returned and the client had to perform another fetch to incrementally obtain more of them. In the /sync API the result always contains the most recent events, creating a gap if this would be more events than the requested limit. If this occurs then the client can use the prev_batch token as a reference to obtaining more.
  • The state contained in the response to a /sync request that has a since parameter will contain only keys that have changed since the basis given in the since parameter, rather than containing a full set values.

The /initialSync API allowed a parameter called limit to limit the number of events returned. To apply this limit to the new /sync API, you can supply an ad-hoc filter:

GET .../sync?filter={"room":{"timeline":{"limit:$limit}}}

There is no direct replacement for the per-room /rooms/:roomId/initialSync endpoint, but the behaviour can be recreated by applying an ad-hoc filter using the filter parameter to /sync that selects only the required room ID:

GET .../sync?filter={"room":{"rooms":[$room_id]}}

However, the way that the new /sync API works should remove any need to do this kind of query, in the situations where the v1 API needed it. Specifically, on joining a new room the initial information about that room is sent in the next /sync batch, so it should not be necessary to query that one room specially.

The following endpoint is deprecated and has no direct replacement:

/events/:eventId

However, if the client knows the room ID of the room that the event is in, it can use the /rooms/:roomId/context/:eventId request to fetch the event itself. By giving the limit parameter of 0 the client can save using extra bandwidth by actually returning additional context events around the requested one.

Removed POST Endpoint

The room message sending API endpoint in v1 accepted both PUT and POST methods, where the client could specify a message ID in the PUT path for de-duplication purposes, or have the server allocate one during POST. In r0 this latter form no longer exists. Clients will now have to generate these IDs locally.

The following URLs have therefore been removed:

POST .../rooms/:roomId/send/:messageType