Handling Channel List Tap Events

Navigation Destination

The SwiftUI SDK comes with default navigation, which can be updated per your needs. For example, you can completely swap the default chat channel view with your own implementation. Alternatively, you can also intercept the on-tap events and provide your own handling.

First, let’s see how you can update the screen that is shown when you tap on a channel. In the ViewFactory protocol, there’s a method called makeChannelDestination, which returns a function with ChannelSelectionInfo as a parameter and a view as a result. This function tells the ChatChannelListView how to create the navigation destination for the channel tap. You need to provide your own implementation with your custom view. The ChannelSelectionInfo type consists of a channel and an optional message. If the message is a not a nil value, you can use it to scroll to a particular message (for example in search results or deep linking).

For simplicity, we are creating a custom view which just displays the name of the channel. Next, in our custom factory, we provide a new creation function for the chat channel.

struct CustomChannelDestination: View {

    var channel: ChatChannel

    var body: some View {
        VStack {
            Text("This is the channel \(channel.name ?? "")")
        }
    }

}

class CustomFactory: ViewFactory {

    @Injected(\.chatClient) public var chatClient

    private init() {}

    public static let shared = CustomFactory()

    func makeChannelDestination() -> (ChannelSelectionInfo) -> CustomChannelDestination {
        { selectionInfo in
            CustomChannelDestination(channel: selectionInfo.channel)
        }
    }
}

Those are the only two things you need to do in order to change the chat channel view with your own custom implementation.

Handling Tap Events

In some cases, you don’t want to push a screen to the navigation stack. You might want to show it as a modal, or do additional checks (show alerts), before going to the next screen.

For cases like this, you need to provide your own implementation of the onItemTap function that is passed when you create the ChatChannelListView.

var body: some Scene {
    WindowGroup {
        ChatChannelListView(viewFactory: CustomFactory.shared) { channel in
            print("\(channel.name ?? "") is tapped")
        }
    }

You can keep the state in the view container that has the ChatChannelListView in its body. Also, you can attach alerts and sheets on the ChatChannelListView itself, to customize the tap behaviour.

Deep linking

The SwiftUI SDK supports deep linking. For example, when you receive a push notification for a new message, you want to be navigated directly to the channel where the message was sent. In order to do this, you can initialize the ChatChannelListView with additional parameter selectedChannelId, which can be extracted from the push notification’s payload.

ChatChannelListView(
    viewFactory: DemoAppFactory.shared,
    selectedChannelId: "someChannelId"
)

Opting out of the default navigation

The ChatChannelListView uses a NavigationView at its root to enable the default navigation described above. You can opt out of using the default NavigationView and embed the ChatChannelListView in your custom navigation stack.

In order to do that, you need to set the embedInNavigationView parameter to false, when creating the ChatChannelListView:

ChatChannelListView(
    viewFactory: DemoAppFactory.shared,
    embedInNavigationView: false
)