room.lastMessages is Always null

[mashegoindustries]

I am streaming rooms using code below
FirebaseChatCore.instance.rooms(orderByUpdatedAt: true)

However it looks like lastMessages is always null
room.lastMessages

I am 100 percent sure that I have last messages on the rooms collection (Which is updated by cloud function)

[markzakharyan]

i had the same issue, it could be that you didnt create a firestore index

[demchenkoalex]

Are you sure room at all is not empty? You need an index as described in the documentation comment for the orderByUpdatedAt or in the comment above. If you have it

I am 100 percent sure that I have last messages on the rooms collection (Which is updated by cloud function)

So you can see lastMessages inside the console but not in the dart code?

[mashegoindustries]

I did create an index. Hence the rooms are showing nicely and the recent active room always appear at the top... Which is awesome.

I can see however lastMessages is always null NOT empty

[mashegoindustries]

[demchenkoalex]

@mashegoindustries I understand, but is it null in the console? Why do you think this is a problem in the library and not in the cloud function which updates it?

[mashegoindustries]

[mashegoindustries]

From console, it looks like Cloud functions has successfully updated last message.

However from FirebaseChatCore dart class, I am not seeing any reference to lastMessages array.

I think data exist in firestore, we are just not referencing the property lastMessages.

I could be wrong

[demchenkoalex]

Are you saying you don't see lastMessages at all? Update to the latest version

[mashegoindustries]

@demchenkoalex I started from scratch, followed the instructions , created firestore index. Using latest version of the plugins.
However I am still not getting any last messages.

Isn't the attached screenshot not the issue? lastMessages is never set

Something like LINE 33 and LINE 68 is absent from the plugin itself

[demchenkoalex]

LOL. How embarrassing :D sorry about that. You could have also done a PR with that so it would be released sooner. Will do now anyway.

UPD: Dart can't manage dynamic and Map<String, dynamic>, apparently it is too hard. Can't create lastMessages from doc.data(). Will need more time to figure that out.

[eopeter]

I need this fix too. Running into error
flutter type '_InternalLinkedHashMap<String, dynamic>' is not a subtype of type....

[eopeter]

I tried the highlighted lines in the screenshot above with

final lastMessages = doc.data()?['lastMessages'] as List<dynamic>?;

and then while creating the room, I did

lastMessages: lastMessages != null ? lastMessages.map((e) => types.Message.fromJson(e)).toList() : <types.Message>[],

But issue is the lastMessage only has authorId and the toJson is failing because author property is null and it expected a types.User map

[eopeter]

resolved author by setting it in cloud function for lastMessages but now it createdAt on lasts message is also failing because it expects an int and the value is DateTime. We may need to write a parser if one does not already exists.

[demchenkoalex]

That's correct. My thought is to create a json from the document data, replace fields like DateTime etc to match the underlying data, and the pass it to the fromJson function, after I'll replace that with some package for JSON serialisation, because chat_ui became too big to manually parse things + this dynamic issue is driving me mad, hopefully some packages work better with whatever values are passed inside, when we know they are correct.

[demchenkoalex]

Fixed in v1.3.0.