Connectors — external channels connected to the knowledge base

Connectors link the messaging channels where your customers and colleagues already are — WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack — to the same knowledge base that powers the internal chat. Conversations stay on your servers: the app calls the channel's APIs with the credentials the administrator supplies, and the answers come from the document knowledge base.

Enterprise edition only (connectors_enabled: false in the Community license — the Community admin panel shows the UpgradePrompt; see Administration). References: packages/shared/src/schemas/connector.schema.ts (the form fields), packages/server/src/routes/connectors.ts (the limits + the router), CHANGELOG.md v0.28.1, packages/shared/src/constants/license.ts. Provenance rows: FACT-CENSUS.md F-CONN-1, F-CONN-2, F-LIC-1.

Creating a connector

Path: Settings → Conversations → Connectors (the New connector button). The form requires:

The archive binding determines the corpus: every question arriving from the channel goes through the same RAG pipeline as internal chats (hybrid search, source citation, synthesis) — the cited answer is sent back on the originating channel.

Editing a connector (v0.28.1)

The connector card in the admin panel carries an overflow menu with an Edit item (the first): it opens a pre-filled dialog over the mutable surface:

• Mutable via `PUT /api/connectors/:id`: name, archive binding, welcome/fallback messages, fallback locale, rate limit, daily session limit (empty = null; 0 = unlimited).
• Immutable by schema: platform, bot token, workspace. A channel or token change = a new connector.
• The isEnabled toggle stays on the card (Switch); the Telegram pollMode stays on the webhook buttons.
• The PUT logs the chat_connector.updated audit event (parity with the DELETE arm).

Platform adapters

Each platform runs a dedicated adapter with its own registration credentials:

Credentials transit and stay server-side; the secret token is never reflected in the UI after creation.

Limits and the fallback message

The rate limit and the daily session limit protect the workspace from external traffic: 0 = unlimited; N = the per-connector maximum. The fallback message (with its configurable fallback locale) is the reply when corpus search yields no valid citable elements — an external channel never receives ungrounded generations when a fallback is configured.

Disabling and audit

• isEnabled (the card Switch) suspends routing without deleting the configuration.
• Connector DELETE is a dedicated audited action (the chat_connector.deleted event, parity with updated).
• Every admin operation on connectors lands in the event log (see Administration).

Activating Enterprise without touching the server

The Enterprise license applies by pasting the key in the panel (Settings → Security → License, GET/PUT/DELETE /api/license/instance): probe-first verification (invalid/expired/plugin_bound/community_tier — a rejected key never persists), AES-256-GCM ciphertext in SystemConfig, runtime application via setCachedLicense. See API reference; F-LIC-1.

This guide covers the operator surface for the connector adapters; the engineering deep dive lives in the twin post:

• The engineering deep dive

Provenance

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Operator reference — Simmetric Chat v0.28.1 (docs refreshed 2026-10-02, census SHA `aca5b8ff`).