Chat UI framework for iOS. Provides all the basic UI elements necessary to implement a chat interface.
A few things are important to keep in mind when using ChatWowViewController:
There are two types of messages: "messages" and "pending messages".
Messages are normal chat messages. They are indexed from newer to older (the most recent message is at index 0). Messages can be inserted at any point in the chat log. For example: If you got a delayed message and after sorting it turns out it is the third most recent message, you insert it in the chat log by invoking:
insert(newMessages: 1, at: 2)
Pending Messages are messages that the user has composed locally and sent to the server, but the delivery has not yet been confirmed. They are drawn with a reduced opacity value (conventional way of marking a message as pending). They are always placed under all messages, regardless of their timestamp. They are also indexed from newer to older (most recent message at index 0), but can only be inserted at index 0. Every time a user composes a message and hits send (or presses return on the keyboard), the following delegate method is called:
chatController:didInsertMessage:
You should then send the message to your server, and immediately call insert(pendingMessages: 1). The message will be inserted in the bottom part of the chat log. When your server confirms the message was delivered, you should update your data source, and then call:
commitPendingMessage(with: oldIndex, to: newIndex)
Where oldIndex is the index of the pending message (where it was in the pending messages stack), and newIndex is the index of the message after being added to the messages stack. ChatWowViewController will perform an animation giving the user the impression that the pending message was moved to the location of the message, when in reality the old view was destroyed and a new cell was created instead. This is important because it means you can render pending and normal messages with different views if you so prefer.
The only "smart" feature (currently) provided by ChatWow is the read timestamp feature. Based only on the return value of the delegate method chatController:readDateForMessageWithIndex:, ChatWowViewController will place
and move a label with such information automatically. You are only required to call setNeedsUpdateReadInfo when you wish the read timestamp info to be updated.
ChatWowViewController supports removing individual messages from the chat log. Remove the message first from your data source, then call removeMessageAtIndex: or removePendingMessageAtIndex.
In order to completely clean the chat log, you will need to first empty your data source, then simply call tableView.reloadData().
If you need to render messages with a custom chat bubble, then you will have to:
- Register the custom views as Nibs on the tableView with a custom reuse identifier.
- Use a custom subclass of
ChatMessagethat returns your reuse identifier as the value ofviewIdentifier:String - Properly estimate the height of your custom view as the return value of the data source method
chatController:estimatedHeightForMessageWithIndex:
It is recommended to have two Nibs for each custom view, one for each "side" of the conversation, and register them with different reuse identifiers. Then you can pick which "side" Nib to use depending on the side of the associated chat message by returning a different reuse identifier on each case. See the implementation of ChatImageMessage as an example.
All built-in chat message views also use this exact same registration behavior, so if your custom views are not working, have a look at the built-in views and subclasses of ChatMessage for a clue on how to do it.
If you decide a pending message has failed delivery, you can inform the user so by setting the hasError field of the respective chat message to true, then calling updatePendingMessageAtIndex: to ask the controller to update that chat message in the chat log.
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