rad chat multiple authors separated like a message system

[John]

Hi, i'm evaluating radchat for winforms for a messenger project i have to do.  

does it natively support multiple authors that are separate from each other?  Think a typical messenger like face book messenger etc.  you have a list of people you're talking to on the left and the current person you're talking to on the right.  

does rad chat support that natively?  if not are there any samples or how too's that show this?

i'd like it to know when a different author is posted to the control and put it in the correct person on the left and light up etc showing it's got a new message.

i've tried adding multiple authors to it with different messages but it just puts them all in the same window with different names above them.

i really need them to be separated out into their own conversations.

Thanks!

[Dess | Tech Support Engineer, Principal]

Hello, John,

RadChat from the Telerik UI for WinForms suite offers exchanging messages between different authors. You can define the author for each message that is added to the chat:

The following help articles give you getting started experience with the Conversational UI:

https://docs.telerik.com/devtools/winforms/controls/chat/getting-started 

https://docs.telerik.com/devtools/winforms/controls/chat/chat-items/messages 

Depending on which Author object is assigned to the RadChat.Author property, his/her messages are displayed on the right side: 

        public RadForm1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();

            Author author1 = new Author(Properties.Resources.AnneDodsworth, "Anne");
            Author author2 = new Author(Properties.Resources.AndrewFuller, "Andrew");
            Author author3 = new Author(Properties.Resources.BobSmill, "Bob");
            this.radChat1.Author = author1;

            ChatTextMessage message1 = new ChatTextMessage("Hello", author2, DateTime.Now.AddHours(1));
            this.radChat1.AddMessage(message1);
            ChatTextMessage message2 = new ChatTextMessage("Hi", this.radChat1.Author, DateTime.Now.AddHours(1).AddMinutes(10));
            this.radChat1.AddMessage(message2);
            ChatTextMessage message3 = new ChatTextMessage("We would like to announce that in the R2 2018 release " +
                                                           "we introduced Conversational UI", author2, DateTime.Now.AddHours(3));
            this.radChat1.AddMessage(message3);
            ChatTextMessage message4 = new ChatTextMessage("This control provides rich conversational experience " +
                                                           "that goes beyond the natural language understanding and " +
                                                           "personality of your chatbot.", author3, DateTime.Now.AddHours(3));
            this.radChat1.AddMessage(message4);
        }

If you are looking for a different visual presentation of the messages by different authors, it would be greatly appreciated if you can provide a sample screenshot of the desired look. Thus, we would get better understanding of the precise case and think about an appropriate solution.

I hope this information helps. If you need any further assistance please don't hesitate to contact me. 

Regards,
Dess | Tech Support Engineer, Principal
Progress Telerik

[John]

TY, but i'm looking for "does your chat control natively handle multiple authors".  I don't want multiple authors in the same window, but something like any messenger app out there.  think fb messenger, what's app, etc etc.  they have the ability to group chats by "author" and i can pick who i'm talking to.  Does rad chat support that out of the box or do i need to write the stuff to handle multiple authors?  Like when i'm in facebook messenger, i'm talking to one person at a time.  if i get a new message from another "author" it goes on the left side of the page into it's own section for that person.  if i want to reply to them, i click them on the left and i see all our conversation history and now i'm talking to that person etc.  pretty much every messenger in existence does something like this.  i'm trying to find out if the chat control does this natively or if i'll have to write all the extra stuff.  since we would only use teleric for this specific rad chat stuff, if i have to write all the extra, it's not a very good deal at that point.  if it does it all out of the box, then i think we're g2g.

[Dess | Tech Support Engineer, Principal]

Hi, John,

Thank you for the provided additional information. Please have in mind that messenger applications like Skype, FB Messenger or Microsoft Teams are advanced chat clients and they provide a lot of features out of the box. However, RadChat is just a UI control and all the functionalities described above are a subject of an application development (like FB Messenger for example), not functionality that comes out of the box from a single UI control like RadChat.

You can start with the tutorial which shows you how you can quickly build a chat bot with Bot Framework and connect it to RadChat: 

https://docs.telerik.com/devtools/winforms/controls/chat/integration/azure-chat-bot