Chat General info

[Vuyiswa]

Good Day 

it looks like i am the only one testing this control  lol , i have made it to work  , i am just missing a few things. 

 

1) How do you remove a specific chat from a Chat List  ? 

2) How do you Select Chat and be show selected Chats ?

3) How do you Clear the Whole Radchat Control ?

4) How do you refresh by adding new chat item wihout the whole control flickering ?

5) i am currently using a webservice to bind the chat and its working nice. now i want to refresh it on intervals. How is that normally done without Push Notification ? (OneSignal does not always work) 

 

Thanks 

 

 

Thanks 

[Lance | Manager Technical Support]

Hello Vuyiswa,

When it comes to items management, you can think of the RadChat control as a specialized List control that is intended to have an ObservableCollection for the ItemsSource. The app logic is responsible for managing what items are in the bound items source, it is this items source that determines what is in the chat.

I highly recommend checking out our demos for the control. To explore the features, here are the SDKExamples demo , you can also see four fully implemented examples in the QSF Demo here.


Direct Answers

Let me address your questions directly:

1) How do you remove a specific chat from a Chat List  ? 

Remove that item from the bound ObservableCollection, for example: MyObservableCollection.Remove(itemToRemove)

This is commonly used when you need to have a "waiting for response..." chat item. This item is added to the collection after the user sends a message, but is then removed when the response arrives.


2) How do you Select Chat and be show selected Chats ?

The ConversationalUI has no concept of selected item.


3) How do you Clear the Whole Radchat Control ?

Clear the items in the bound items source, for example:  MyObservableCollection.Clear()


4) How do you refresh by adding new chat item wihout the whole control flickering ?

You should not see flickering if you use MyObservableCollection.Add(itemToAdd). The most likely reason you see flickering is because the entire ItemsSource has been replaced, avoid this at all costs because it not only causes flickering, but also has a performance cost.


5) i am currently using a webservice to bind the chat and its working nice. now i want to refresh it on intervals. How is that normally done without Push Notification ? (OneSignal does not always work) 

This functionality is outside the scope of responsibility for the control as it entirely depends on how the chat framework you're using works. For example, in the fully implemented demos I mentioned above, we use Azure BotService in this BotService class (I think Bot Framework uses WebSockets with SignalR).

If you're looking for general suggestions on what type of service to build into your custom web service, I recommend posting the question on StackOverflow so you can get balanced feedback from users of many frameworks.


Further Assistance

I hope I was able to answer your questions, if you have any further issues, please open a support ticket here and attach the problematic code so that we can investigate directly.


Regards,
Lance | Tech Support Engineer, Sr.
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[Vuyiswa]

Good Day 

Thank you for the response. 

1) Noted with thanks , that resolved my Question. 

2) if ConversationalUI is a list of Collection , i cant select an item in the control like one could do in a ListView ? 

3) Noted with Thanks , that resolved my Question 

4) Thanks , i resolved that issue using a Solution you Suggested in Point 5 

5) SignalR worked and its working nice. Serialization also came in handy because SignalR does not accept Objects directly. so it works very nice. 

 

[Lance | Manager Technical Support]

Hi Vuyiswa,

Although the data source is a collection, it doesn't guarantee the UI component rendering those data items has a selection mechanism.

We didn't see a demand for entire chat item selection when building the control or during the beta.  The only time selection made sense is when there's a picker card (like DatePicker, ItemsPicker card). These items have their own built-in selection mechanisms which report back to the chat service (see the QSF demos I pointed to, particularly the Travel Assistant).

If you need selection in the item, you could add a button or other item in the chat to facilitate your custom needs. You can inspect the BindingContext of the button for the data item.

Regards,
Lance | Tech Support Engineer, Sr.
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