Chat object

Once you initialize the Chat SDK and create its instance, you'll get immediate access to the Chat entity from which you can call the PubNub server.

To communicate with PubNub, you can use various methods. For example, you can use deleteChannel() to remove a given channel or wherePresent() to check which channels a given user is subscribed to.

By calling methods on the Chat entity, you create chat objects like Channel, User, Message, Membership, ThreadChannel, and ThreadMessage. These objects also expose Chat API under various methods, letting you perform CRUD operations on messages, channels, users, the related user-channel membership, and many more.

Each of these entities comes with a set of "read-only" parameters you define when creating, modifying, and deleting specific channels, users, messages, or memberships in your chat app.

Properties

The Chat interface has the following properties:

interface Chat {
    val config: ChatConfiguration
    val pubNub: PubNub
    val currentUser: User

    ...
}

Parameter	Description
config Type: ChatConfiguration	ChatConfiguration contains chat app configuration settings, such as logLevel or typingTimeout that you can provide when initializing your chat app with the init() method. You can later directly access these properties, like: chat.storeUserActivityInterval.
pubNub Type: PubNub	pubNub lets you access any Kotlin SDK method. For example, if you want to call a method available in the App Context API, you'd use chat.pubNub.getAllUUIDMetadata().
currentUser Type: User	User object representing current user.

ChatConfiguration includes these properties:

interface ChatConfiguration {
    val logLevel: LogLevel
    val typingTimeout: Duration
    val storeUserActivityInterval: Duration
    val storeUserActivityTimestamps: Boolean
    val pushNotifications: PushNotificationsConfig
    val rateLimitFactor: Int
    val rateLimitPerChannel: Map<ChannelType, Duration>
    val customPayloads: CustomPayloads?
}

PushNotificationsConfig includes these properties:

class PushNotificationsConfig(
    val sendPushes: Boolean,
    val deviceToken: String?,
    val deviceGateway: PNPushType,
    val apnsTopic: String?,
    val apnsEnvironment: PNPushEnvironment
)

To initialize the Chat SDK, you must provide two parameters: subscribeKey, and userId, while all other settings (mentioned above) are optional. Read the Configuration page for details.

Methods

You can call the following methods on the Chat object.

Click on each method for more details.

• createUser()
• createDirectConversation()
• createGroupConversation()
• createPublicConversation()
• currentUser
• deleteChannel()
• deleteUser()
• emitEvent()
• getEventsHistory()
• getChannel()
• getChannels()
• getCurrentUserMentions()
• getUnreadMessagesCounts()
• getUser()
• getUsers()
• getPushChannels()
• init()
• isPresent()
• listenForEvents()
• markAllMessagesAsRead
• registerPushChannels()
• setRestrictions()
• unregisterPushChannels()
• unregisterAllPushChannels()
• updateChannel()
• updateUser()
• wherePresent()
• whoIsPresent()

Use case

For example, you can use the Chat object methods to:

• Create a channel or user.
• Get channel or user data.