Implementing Own Capabilities
Each Channel
has a list of capabilities that can be performed in it, such as muting a user, deleting messages and many
others. Not all channels should have the same capabilities neither should all users, which is where own capabilities
come into play.
Inside of Channel
you will find a property with a signature ownCapabilities: Set<String>
. Which channel capabilities
this set contains depends on the current user’s role (for example admin, guest, etc.), the channel type (for example messaging,
livestream, etc.) and channel level settings. You can read more about channel
capabilities here and more about channel
level settings here.
Integrating channel capabilities into the UI
If you are using our UI components bound to our ViewModel
s, then own capabilities work out of the box without any
additional effort from your side, otherwise you will have to pass the correct set of capabilities to individual components.
Different components have different ways of passing own capabilities to them, so we’ll go through them individually. Capabilities that were a part of the minimal chat experience before the introduction of own capabilities will be highlighted in bold with an asterisk next to them.
As a safety precaution, by default own capabilities are initially set to an empty set, this means that a user has no capabilities. Setting it to a set containing all capabilities will give the user potentially dangerous capabilities such as the ability to delete any message.
MessageListView
Inside MessageListView
you will find the following function:
public fun setOwnCapabilities(ownCapabilities: Set<String>)
After setting own capabilities, the following capabilities will be regulated:
- send-reaction *
- send-reply *
- pin-message
- delete-any-message
- delete-own-message *
- update-any-message
- update-own-message *
- ban-channel-members
*For this component, as well as all the other examples, the capabilities in bold are a part of the "default" behavior that is set up for most users in the dashboard.
MessageInputView
Inside MessageInputView
you will find the following function:
public fun setOwnCapabilities(ownCapabilities: Set<String>)
After setting own capabilities, the following capabilities will be regulated:
- send-message *
- send-links *
- upload-file *
- send-typing-events *
ChannelListView
If you use our ChannelListView
as is, no further action is needed as it is set up to use own
capabilities.
It regulates the following capabilities.
- leave-channel *
- delete-channel
ChannelListView
contains the following function:
public fun setMoreOptionsClickListener(listener: ChannelClickListener?)
Should you wish to use it in order to override the default behavior, you will have to implement a UI capable of correctly using own capabilities.
Other capabilities
There are channel capabilities which are not implemented in the SDK because we do not offer the corresponding components or the functionality. You can implement these yourself after creating the correct components.
These are as follows:
- freeze-channel
- set-channel-cooldown
- update-channel
- update-channel-members
- search-messages
Please note that while we do offer a search component, its functionality is not simple enough to be regulated by the 'search-messages' capability.
How capabilities affect the UI
Let's take MessageInputView
into consideration.
If we left it with the default, empty set of own capabilities we would get the following result:
This leaves the user unable to perform any action provided by MessageInputView
.
Ideally, you should let your Dashboard App settings regulate capabilities, but if you wish to control them manually, you can do so.
Take a look at the object called ChannelCapabilities
:
public object ChannelCapabilities {
/** Ability to ban channel members. */
public const val BAN_CHANNEL_MEMBERS: String = "ban-channel-members"
... // Other capabilities
}
The file containing ChannelCapabilities
can be
found here.
This object contains all relevant channel capabilities as type safe properties. You can use the properties to build a set containing only the capabilities you want enabled for the user.
If you were to enable the user to send messages, links, attachments and typing events, you would build a set as follows:
val customOwnCapabilities = setOf(
ChannelCapabilities.SEND_MESSAGE,
ChannelCapabilities.SEND_LINKS,
ChannelCapabilities.UPLOAD_FILE,
ChannelCapabilities.SEND_TYPING_EVENTS
)
Then call the following method from an instance of MessageInputView
and pass in your set of capabilities:
messageInputView.setOwnCapabilities(ownCapabilities = customOwnCapabilities)
This enables the following capabilities:
- send-message *
- send-links *
- upload-file *
- send-typing-events *
And results in MessageInputView
having the following appearance:
Please note that providing custom client side capabilities leaves you in charge of making sure that users are not awarded with dangerous capabilities and that different clients are in sync. This is why it is recommended to fetch own capabilities that are provided to you by the server.