How to change a previous Inlinekeyboard message from a normal message

Question

In my bot, the user is supposed to interact mostly through Inlinekeyboard messages.

So, if the user writes some 'regular' message or sends something, I must somehow change the last Inlinekeyboard message to continue the process or give him some message.

See the picture below:

The user wrote some message but I had to create a new Inlinekeyboard button with the new message because I couldn't find a way to get the message_id of the previous 'Welcome' button and change it.

My code:

HELP = range(1)

def start(bot, update):
    keyboard = [
                 [InlineKeyboardButton('Help', callback_data='help')]
               ]

    # Create initial message:
    message = 'Welcome.'

    update.message.reply_text(message, reply_markup=InlineKeyboardMarkup(keyboard))

def help(bot, update):

    keyboard = [
                 [InlineKeyboardButton('Help', callback_data='help')]
               ]

    bot.edit_message_text(
        text='Help ... help..',
        chat_id=update.callback_query.message.chat_id,
        message_id=update.callback_query.message.message_id,
        reply_markup=InlineKeyboardMarkup(keyboard)
    )
    bot.answer_callback_query(update.callback_query.id, text='')

def unknown(bot, update):

    message = 'Please press the Help button for more instructions.'

    keyboard = [
                 [InlineKeyboardButton('Help', callback_data='help')]
               ]

    update.message.reply_text(message, reply_markup=InlineKeyboardMarkup(keyboard))



# Create the EventHandler and pass it your bot's token.
updater = Updater(token=config.TELEGRAM_API_TOKEN)

# Get the dispatcher to register handlers:
dispatcher = updater.dispatcher

dispatcher.add_handler(CommandHandler('start', start))
dispatcher.add_handler(CallbackQueryHandler(help, pattern='help'))
dispatcher.add_handler(MessageHandler(Filters.all, unknown))

updater.start_polling()

updater.idle()    

Best Regards. Kleyson Rios.

Answer 1

If you want to edit the previous messages that the bot has sent, you need to store their message_id (which you already know).

So you can simply do this:

sent_message = update.message.reply_text(
    message,
    reply_markup=InlineKeyboardMarkup(keyboard)
)

And then you can access it like sent_message.message_id

Now for the variable sent_message, you can make it global or create a separate file to handle these variables, or at larger scale, you can store it in a database.