Choose between Phone number and AlphaNumeric Sender Id when send SMS in Messaging Service

Question

I added a phone number and an Alphanumeric Sender Id to a Messaging Service. And my app has a logic to choose between sending by a Phone number or AlphaSenderId.

Could you please provide me API in Messaging Service to have the ability to choose between the Phone number and AlphaSenderId when sending an SMS?

Answer 1

The messaging service will pick the sender automatically based on the country you send the message to. From the doc:

If you add an Alpha Sender to your Twilio Messaging Service, Twilio will select the Alphanumeric Sender ID automatically when you send a message to a supported country, unless you also have a short code number in that same country.

I.e. you cannot influence this manually when you send a message via such an API call:

client.messages
  .create({
     body: 'Revenge of the Sith was clearly the best of the prequel trilogy.',
     from: 'MG9752274e9e519418a7406176694466fa',
     to: '+441632960675'
   })
  .then(message => console.log(message.sid));

But you could do something like this:

const useMS = false;
client.messages
  .create({
     body: 'Revenge of the Sith was clearly the best of the prequel trilogy.',
     from: useMS ? 'MG9752274e9e519418a7406176694466fa' :  '+441632960670',
     to: '+441632960675'
   })
  .then(message => console.log(message.sid));

or use the messagingServiceSid property in combination with from:

client.messages
  .create({
    from: useAlpha ? 'AlphaSenderID' :  '+440000000',
    messagingServiceSid: "MGxxxxxx",
    body: 'Revenge of the Sith was clearly the best of the prequel trilogy.',
    to: '+441632960675'
   })
  .then(message => console.log(message.sid));