Message UI

This project is still in development and is not ready for production use. Use at your own risk :)

Message UI is designed to be a simple, easy to use, easy to compose and modify UI library for building chat applications. It is built on top of React, Styled-Components and TypeScript.

Installation

Yarn

$ yarn add message-ui styled-components

NPM

$ npm install message-ui styled-components

Finally, import into your project and have fun!

import { ComposePanel } from "message-ui";

Usage

Simple App

import React from "react";
import { ChatWindow, ChatList, BubbleMessage, ComposePanel } from "message-ui";

const ChatApp = () => {
  // useChatAPI is not a real hook, but you get the idea
  // it's a stand in for your integration with a server that supports messages
  const { messages, input, setInput, append, reload, isLoading } = useChatAPI();

  return (
    <>
      <ChatWindow>
        {messages.length ? (
          <ChatList>
            {messages.map((message, index) =>
              <BubbleMessage message={message} key={index} />
            )}
          </ChatList>
        ) : null}
      </ChatWindow>
      <ComposePanel
        input={input}
        onSend={append}
        onReload={reload}
        disabled={isLoading}
        onInputChange={setInput} />
    </>
  );
};

Customizing Components

Message UI is designed to be easy to customize. All components are built using styled-components, so you can easily override the styles of any component. For example, if you wanted to change the style of the chat bubble BubbleMessage component, you could do the following:

import { BubbleMessage } from "message-ui";

const MyBubbleMessage = styled(BubbleMessage)`
    font-size: 1.5rem;
    color: ${(props) => (props.role === "user" ? "green" : "yellow")};
    background-color: ${(props) => (props.role === "user" ? "yellow" : "green")};
`;

Validating Input

To validate the users input before sending use validate function. This function takes in a string and returns a boolean or object matching Validation type. By default, the input validates that theres at least one character in the string (return value.trim() !== ""), but the requirements of your app may require stricter validation. To do this, pass in a function to the validate:

function myValidationFunction(value: string) {
    if (value.length < 5) {
        return false;
    }

    return true;
}

// or

function myValidationFunction(value: string) {
    if (value.length < 5) {
        return {
            valid: false,
            message: "Must be at least 5 characters long"
        }
    }

    return {
        valid: true,
    }
}

then pass it to the validate prop, which is accessible via the ComposeForm or ComposePanel components depending on your level of customization. For most cases, the ComposePanel component will be sufficient.

<ComposePanel validate={myValidationFunction} {...otherProps} />

Development

Please feel free to contribute to this project. If you have any questions, please feel free to open an issue. Message UI is intended to be just that, a UI library, so integrations with message, or chat APIs is not on the roadmap. However, if you have a suggestion for a feature, please open an issue and I will be happy to discuss it with you.

Get Started

$ git clone git://github.com/kenzic/message-ui.git
$ cd message-ui
$ yarn install
$ yarn storybook