renderText function
The renderText
function is a core piece of functionality, which handles how the text of our message is going to be formatted/look like. The default renderText
function parses a markdown string and outputs a ReactElement
. Under the hood, the output is generated by the ReactMarkdown
component from react-markdown library. The component transforms the markdown to ReactElement
by using remark
parser and remark
and rehype
plugins.
The default remark
plugins used by SDK are:
remark-gfm
- a third party plugin to add GitHub-like markdown support
The default rehype
plugins (both specific to this SDK) are:
- plugin to render user mentions
- plugin to render emojis
Overriding Defaults
Custom renderText
Function
If you don't want your chat implementation to support markdown syntax by default you can override the default behaviour by creating a custom renderText
function which returns a React node and passing it down to the MessageList
or MessageSimple
component via renderText
property.
For this particular example we'll create a very primitive one which takes the message text passed down to it as a first argument and returns it wrapped in span
element:
import { MessageList } from 'stream-chat-react';
const customRenderText = (text) => {
return <span>{text}</span>;
};
export const WrappedMessageList = () => <MessageList renderText={customRenderText} />;
Here's also an example with VirtualizedMessageList
which currently does not accept renderText
directly:
import { VirtualizedMessageList, MessageSimple } from 'stream-chat-react';
const customRenderText = (text) => {
return <span>{text}</span>;
};
const CustomMessage = (props) => <MessageSimple {...props} renderText={customRenderText} />;
export const WrappedVirtualizedMessageList = () => (
<VirtualizedMessageList Message={CustomMessage} />
);
Custom Element Rendering
If you feel like the default output is sufficient, but you'd like to adjust how certain ReactMarkdown components look like (like strong
element generated by typing **strong**) you can do so by passing down options to a third argument of the default renderText
function:
Types mention
and emoji
are special case component types generated by our SDK's custom rehype plugins.
import { renderText } from 'stream-chat-react';
const CustomStrongComponent = ({ children }) => (
<b className='custom-strong-class-name'>{children}</b>
);
const CustomMentionComponent = ({ children, node: { mentionedUser } }) => (
<a data-user-id={mentionedUser.id} href={`/user-profile/${mentionedUser.id}`}>
{children}
</a>
);
export const WrappedMessageList = () => (
<MessageList
renderText={(text, mentionedUsers) =>
renderText(text, mentionedUsers, {
customMarkDownRenderers: { strong: CustomStrongComponent, mention: CustomMentionComponent },
})
}
/>
);
Custom Remark and Rehype Plugins
If you would like to extend the array of plugins used to parse the markdown, you can provide your own lists of remark resp. rehype plugins. The logic that determines what plugins are used and in which order can be specified in custom getRehypePlugins
and getRemarkPlugins
functions. These receive the default array of rehype and remark plugins for further customization. Both custom functions ought to be passed to the third renderText
parameter. An example follows:
It is important to understand what constitutes a rehype or remark plugin. A good start is to learn about the library called react-remark
which is used under the hood in our renderText
function.
import { renderText, RenderTextPluginConfigurator } from 'stream-chat-react';
import { customRehypePlugin } from './rehypePlugins';
import { customRemarkPlugin } from './remarkPlugins';
const getRehypePlugins: RenderTextPluginConfigurator = (plugins) => {
return [customRehypePlugin, ...plugins];
};
const getRemarkPlugins: RenderTextPluginConfigurator = (plugins) => {
return [customRemarkPlugin, ...plugins];
};
const customRenderText = (text, mentionedUsers) =>
renderText(text, mentionedUsers, {
getRehypePlugins,
getRemarkPlugins,
});
const WrappedMessageList = () => <MessageList renderText={customRenderText} />;
It is also possible to define your custom set of allowed tag names for the elements rendered from the parsed markdown. To perform the tree transformations, you will need to use libraries like unist-builder
to build the trees and unist-util-visit
or hast-util-find-and-replace
to traverse the tree:
import { findAndReplace } from 'hast-util-find-and-replace';
import { u } from 'unist-builder';
import {
defaultAllowedTagNames,
renderText,
RenderTextPluginConfigurator,
} from 'stream-chat-react';
// wraps every letter b in <xxx></xxx> tags
const customTagName = 'xxx';
const replace = (match) => u('element', { tagName: customTagName }, [u('text', match)]);
const customRehypePlugin = () => (tree) => findAndReplace(tree, /b/, replace);
const getRehypePlugins: RenderTextPluginConfigurator = (plugins) => {
return [customRehypePlugin, ...plugins];
};
const customRenderText = (text, mentionedUsers) =>
renderText(text, mentionedUsers, {
allowedTagNames: [...defaultAllowedTagNames, customTagName],
getRehypePlugins,
});
const WrappedMessageList = () => <MessageList renderText={customRenderText} />;