Chat

The Chat component is a React Context provider that wraps the entire Stream Chat application. It provides the ChatContext to its children, which includes the StreamChat client instance. All other components within the library must be nested as children of Chat to maintain proper functionality.

Basic Usage

The Chat component does not inject any UI, so its implementation is fairly simple. Once an instance of the StreamChat client has been created, you pass the client object as a prop to add it to the ChatContext.

<Chat client={client}>
  <Channel channel={channel}>
    <MessageList />
    <MessageInput />
  </Channel>
</Chat>

Any child of the Chat component has access to the ChatContext. Each React Context in the component library can be accessed with one of our custom hooks, which must be imported individually. The ChatContext values are accessed with useChatContext hook.

const { client } = useChatContext();

Props

client

The StreamChat client instance. Any methods from the stream-chat-js API interface can be run off this object.

const channel = client.channel("messaging", {
  members: ["nate", "roy"],
});

customClasses

Object containing custom CSS classnames to override the library’s default container CSS. Many of the high level React components in the library come with predefined CSS container classes that inject basic display styling. To remove or replace these wrapper classes entirely, the Chat component takes a customClasses prop. This prop accepts a mapping of overridable container classnames.

In the below example we will replace two of the default container classes, str-chat (maps to the chat key) and str-chat-channel (maps to the channel) key. Once replaced, add whatever styles you want in your own stylesheets.

const customClasses: CustomClasses = {
  chat: "custom-chat-class",
  channel: "custom-channel-class",
};

const App = () => (
  <Chat client={client} customClasses={customClasses}>
    <ChannelList />
    <Channel>
      <Window>
        <ChannelHeader />
        <MessageList />
        <MessageInput />
      </Window>
      <Thread />
    </Channel>
  </Chat>
);

The accepted object keys and the default classnames they override are as follows:

• chat - str-chat
• chatContainer - str-chat__container
• channel - str-chat-channel
• channelList - str-chat-channel-list
• message - str-chat__li str-chat__li--${groupStyles}
• messageList - str-chat__list
• thread - str-chat__thread
• threadList - str-chat__list--thread
• virtualMessage - str-chat__virtual-list-message-wrapper
• virtualizedMessageList - str-chat__virtual-list

defaultLanguage

Sets the default fallback language for UI component translation, defaults to ‘en’ for English.

i18nInstance

The Streami18n translation instance. Create an instance of this class when you wish to change the connected user’s default language or override default text in the library.

const i18nInstance = new Streami18n({
  language: "es",
  translationsForLanguage: {
    "Nothing yet...": "Nada",
  },
});

<Chat client={client} i18nInstance={i18nInstance}>
  {/* children of Chat component */}
</Chat>;

initialNavOpen

The prop controls setting of the class str-chat-channel-list--open on the ChannelList root div. It is up to the integrator to decide, what styles should be assigned to this class to control the app layout. An example could be as follows:

@media screen and (min-width: 768px) {
  .str-chat-channel-list--open {
    width: 100%;
  }

  .str-chat-channel-list {
    position: fixed;
    z-index: 1;
    width: 0;
  }
}

Here, the list will take the whole width of the screen on small devices once the class str-chat-channel-list--open is assigned to the root div. Otherwise, the list is not visible as it has zero width.

theme

Used for injecting className/s to the Channel and ChannelList components.

useImageFlagEmojisOnWindows

Windows 10 does not support country flag emojis out of the box. It chooses to render these emojis as characters instead. Stream Chat can override this behavior by loading a custom web font that will render images instead (PNGs or SVGs depending on the platform). Set this prop to true if you want to use these custom emojis for Windows users.