Highlights

React SDK

Are you using React for your project? Then life has just become a lot easier, with an official React SDK for TalkJS. With React components for TalkJS, you can have all the goodness of the TalkJS pre-built chat UIs inside your React web application in no time. 

TypeScript bindings are included.

Install the @talkjs/react npm package and get started.

Mark conversation as unread

Users can now mark conversations as unread. When a user marks a conversation as unread, a small dot appears inside the conversation header in their inbox to indicate the unread status. When the user switches focus back to the conversation, the unread message marker disappears.

Menu option to mark a conversation as unread

In new themes, the Mark conversation as unread feature is automatically active. For existing themes, you can follow the upgrade guide to enable marking conversations as unread.

Batch update users

Do you need to update details for multiple users? Forget making one API call after the other. You can now batch update the properties of many users at once, using the REST API. Simply send a PUT request with user objects with updated details to the /users endpoint.

Read more on how to batch update users.

Action buttons

Action buttons and action links are an easy way to let users perform quick-response actions. You can now execute custom code in your chat to create action buttons and action links.

Action buttons for color selection

You can add action buttons and links to your components in the theme editor, or apply special formatting to your messages directly. 

For security reasons, adding action buttons and action links to messages only works with messages sent via the REST API.

Read more on action buttons and action links.

Overview of other changes

Added

• Added options for customizing various components of the message field area of a conversation. This includes customizable components for the reply bar, voice recorder, audio player, emoji suggest bar, and the mention suggest list.
• Enabled message actions (such as deleting, favoriting, or reporting a message) also for users who only have read access to a conversation.
• Added a thumbnail element to themes that support a src attribute, which can be used to display image, audio, or video files that are not message attachments.

Changed

• Improved message visibility by scrolling the message field into view when it gets focused.
• Improved image previews by using the image dimensions for images that have not yet been loaded, while they are loading.
• Improved the color contrast for @mentions in the Default Dark theme.

Fixed

• Fixed an issue where the iframe background would show up light, even when the color scheme in the host webpage was set to dark.
• Fixed an issue where an audio recording playback was not properly loaded on Safari.
• Fixed a bug where focusing the message field would cause the host webpage to scroll down in Chrome and Firefox.
• Fixed a bug where email notifications for messages containing mentions would fail to send when using a templated email theme.
• Fixed several bugs where, when editing a message, the message field was not displayed correctly or the message list would have incorrect padding.
• Fixed an issue where, in the Default Dark theme, search result highlighting would make the found text unreadable.

Security

• Addressed a potential cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability related to uploading SVG files. When clicking on an SVG file, a user will now download the file, rather than open it directly in the browser.

👋 Thoughts? Questions? Get in touch.

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Highlights

Edit participant data directly from your dashboard

You can now edit the data of any participant in a conversation directly from your TalkJS dashboard. 

To edit a participant’s data, go to the Activity section of the dashboard. From the Conversation history section of the activity landing page, select a conversation that contains the participant whose details you would like to edit. A page with conversation details will open. Click on the name of the participant whose details you would like to edit to open their User details page.

User details page with the option to edit a conversation participant’s data

You can edit any participant detail apart from the ID, which acts as a stable, unique identifier of the participant.

Image previews resize to fit aspect ratio

Image or video files now have improved thumbnail previews. Instead of cropping an image to fit, the preview thumbnail will resize to match the aspect ratio of the message attachment you sent. 

Image previews automatically resize to fit the aspect ratio of the file you sent

If you have previously edited the MessageBody component in your theme, you can follow the upgrade guide to add full support for improved attachment thumbnails.

Overview of other changes

Added

• Added bulleted list formatting to messages. You can now type *, + or - at the start of a new line, and your unordered list will automatically be formatted with bullet points in the sent message.
• Added an unread message counter to the Default Dark theme.
• Added support for playing MPEG transport stream (MPEG-TS) audio or video files (.ts, .tsv, .tsa, or .m2t). When you upload an MPEG-TS file, a preview with player options will automatically appear.

Changed

• Made various improvements to exporting a conversation transcript: the transcript export progress is calculated more accurately; download links have improved; the sender ID will be added to the transcript export; a date string will be used in the exported file name.

Fixed

• Fixed a bug where users who had been removed from a conversation were still able to reply to that conversation via email.
• Fixed a bug in the JS SDK where a rapid sequence of creating and destroying a chatbox would crash the chat.
• Fixed an error where, on the Activity view of the dashboard, it was not possible to delete a conversation.
• Fixed a bug where, on the Activity view of the dashboard, the participants dropdown would disappear after opening.
• Fixed an issue where the chat would crash when changing between chats while replying to a message.
• Fixed an issue where @mentions would break when they contained markup.
• Fixed an issue in the accuracy of the unread message counter.
• Fixed an issue where conversation participants with read permissions were not able to mark a conversation as read.  

Deprecated

• Deprecated syncThemeForLocalDev in the JS SDK. Instead of using this method, you can use custom themes, which give you full control over the HTML and CSS of chat messages.

This changelog entry reflects changes to TalkJS introduced between 12 June 2023 and 15 July 2023.

Highlights

Unread message counter in REST API and Javascript SDK

You now have two new fields available in the user's conversations REST API endpoint that will provide further insight into a user's unread messages. The unreadMessageCount field in the Conversation object will allow you to retrieve the number of unread messages a user has in a conversation. This will help in tailoring badges for the user interface.

Further, the isUnread property indicates whether the conversation has been read by the user or not. isUnread offers a convenient way to determine the read status of the conversation.

Check out the updated REST API documentation for more information and usage examples.

The unreadMessageCount property is also available in the Javascript SDK.

Export conversation data from dashboard

Exporting conversation data doesn’t need to be a hassle. You can now export conversation data from your dashboard with just a click. 

To export conversation data, go to the Activity view on the dashboard. Select a conversation, and then click Export Conversation Data. You can save a transcript as a text file, or export all the relevant data as a JSON object.

The dashboard button to export conversation data as .txt or .json files

Overview of other changes

Added

• Added several methods to Chatbox in the React Native SDK: getCurrentConversation, to retrieve the conversation currently shown in the UI; onCustomConversationAction, which triggers when a user launches a custom action on a conversation within the TalkJS UI; onLeaveConversation, which triggers when the user clicks the Leave conversation action; and sendLocation, which sends the user's current location to the currently active conversation.
• Added the isForegroundEvent property to NotificationPressedEvent in the React Native SDK, which indicates whether the user pressed the notification while the app was in the foreground or not.
• Added a leave method to ConversationBuilder in the React Native SDK, which removes the current user from the conversation.
• Added support for passing data to themes in both the Chatbox and the ConversationList layouts in the React Native SDK.
• Added Catalan (ca) to the list of languages available for localization of the TalkJS interface. A massive thank you and credit to Relab Studio for providing the translation.

Fixed

• Fixed an issue that prevented Firebase Dynamic Links from generating link previews.
• Fixed an issue which disabled zooming in when clicking the MessageField on iOS for the React Native SDK.
• Fixed a bug that prevented handling notifications in the background on Android for the React Native SDK.
• Fixed a bug where the app would not open when a notification was clicked on Android for the React Native SDK.
• Fixed a bug where dismissed notifications were not being removed from the internal list of active notifications on Android for the React Native SDK.
• Fixed an issue in the theme editor where navigation links in test mode would link to live mode, instead of to test mode.

Changed

• Made the WebView transparent in the React Native SDK. With a transparent WebView, the background color you have applied to the parent View will be used in the empty areas around the TalkJS UI.
• Changed the type of the conversation property in SelectConversationEvent from ConversationBuilder to ConversationData in the React Native SDK.
• Upgraded dependencies for the React Native SDK.
• Improved various UX aspects of the dashboard’s themes page, including improvements to the layout and dropdown menus, as well as adding the options to delete custom files, hide built-in (non-top-level) files, and reset a file to the preset version.

One of the most common requests is for better moderation features built into the TalkJS dashboard. We're delighted to release the first of those new moderation tools!

Conversation Details

After selecting a conversation from the activity viewer in the dashboard, you can now edit properties like its subject, photo, and welcome messages. If you want to get rid of the conversation completely, deleting all messages and removing it from the inbox's conversation list, you can do that too.

Contact Suppression

We've also given you much more control over what content is automatically suppressed in chats, and allowed you to specify the replacement text. So if you want to ban phone numbers but allow links, you can! If that's not enough, you can even specify your own patterns to be suppressed.

• Create + delete users, and choose which conversations they are in
• Edit user properties like name, email address, and phone number
• Edit + delete everyone's messages, and send messages as specific users

Is there anything we're missing that would help you moderate conversations? Get in touch and let us know! Leave a comment below, get in touch via our live chat, or email dev@talkjs.com

Other Improvements

It has been 3 months since our last changelog, so read on to learn about everything else we've been working on behind the scenes. First a few smaller features and changes you might have noticed:

• All plans now let you have more guests in a conversation: up to 300 for the basic plan and 1250 on growth, using super group chats
• When sending a message with the REST API, you can send it as a reply to another message using the referencedMessageId parameter
• We added a quickstart guide for Svelte and updated the React guide to show both Functional and Class components
• We updated to a fancy new set of icons, so your chats will look better than ever
• We completely redesigned our website and it's gorgeous!

With your help, we tracked down and fixed a lot of little bugs, like:

• Specifying the conversation photo as a relative path like photo.jpg will be relative to your website rather than talkjs.com
• On mobile, the popup close button is normal size again
• When uploading a very tall image, the preview dialog doesn't extend off the top of the screen any more

And my favourite customer-reported bug: A kind Spanish user explained that the word Save should be translated to Guardar and not SaveGuardarThe  😂

However, our main focus since last time has been on improving the performance and stability of our servers. It's all a bit too technical to discuss here, but keep an eye out on our blog for posts taking a technical deep-dive into the improvements.

The important part is that our servers run faster, return less errors, and experience less downtime. We're not done yet, but we're confident that your TalkJS experience will be better than ever.

We're excited to be working on more user-visible features again, and hope you're excited too! Please do get in touch and let us know what you want to see in TalkJS this year, because everything we do is driven by your feedback!

You can now mention any participant in a conversation by typing @ followed by their name. Once you've typed the at-symbol, a menu will come up so you can quickly select the person you're looking for.

With the addition of mentions also comes a new option for notifications. When adding/updating a participant to a conversation, you can now set the "notify" option to "MentionsOnly" to only be notified when someone mentions the user. You can learn more about the different notification settings in our documentation on participants.

New Additions to the JavaScript SDK

• Added a sendFile method to all widgets to send a file to the current conversation.. You can pass it a Blob to upload a specific file directly from your application. If you don't specify a file, the file picker dialog will open, so the user can pick a file to upload.
• Added a sendLocation method to all widgets. It will send the user's current location in the current conversation.

Note that both methods still open the confirmation dialog, so the user can confirm or cancel sending the message.

• Added an onKeyDown method to all  widgets.

React Native SDK TalkJS for React Native v0.4.0

With this release, we have updated the SDK's dependencies and peer dependencies to keep them up to date and also fix bugs in some of them. As of npm v7, peer dependencies are installed by default so upgrading the TalkJS SDK should also upgrade the peer dependencies accordingly. For yarn users, you may have to update the packages individually as shown:

yarn upgrade @notifee/react-native@^5.3.0 @react-native-community/push-notification-ios@^1.10.1 @react-native-firebase/app@^14.11.0 @react-native-firebase/messaging@^14.11.0 react-native-webview@^11.21.2

These libraries are defined as peer dependencies rather than dependencies since they contain native code and currently, React Native does not auto link transitive dependencies.

The new version of the notifee library also eliminates the need to add the local maven repository manually to your project. You can remove the section below. (Your app will still build and run if you don't remove it)

maven {
  url "$rootDir/../node_modules/@notifee/react-native/android/libs"
}

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where certain sequences could of numbers and symbols could be incorrectly treated as phone numbers, meaning they would be turned into links or suppressed by contact info suppression.
• Fixed an issue where the scroll position was not maintained properly when the on-screen keyboard opened.
• Fixed an issue where quickly switching between conversations on a slow network could cause an error.
• Fixed an issue in Safari where message parsing could cause an error.
• Our dashboard should now give more useful errors for invalid APNS certificates
• Guests can now delete messages in conversations, if their role grants them to necessary permissions.
• Screen readers should now be able to better announce emoji in messages
• Fixed an issue where push notifications on IOS didn't have a sound
• Fixed an issue where the activity pag'e on the dashboard wouldn't load for certain customers with a lot of conversations
• Fixed an issue where the scroll bar wasn't visible on dark themes

New  Push Notifications

Push notifications are a critical part of what we offer and we are very excited to make it available on our Flutter SDK. Similar to our React Native SDK, we have abstracted registering of the device token among other things to make adding push notifications a fairly straightforward thing. You can check out our documentation for a step by step guide on what you'll need to do to setup push notifications on Android and iOS through Firebase and Apple Push Notification service respectively.

improvement File Upload on Android

Due to the nature of the WebView implementation on Android and limitations of the Flutter equivalent, we had initially shipped the Flutter SDK without support for file uploads on Android. At the time of writing, various factors prevent the maintainers of the Flutter Webview plugin from shipping this feature. We believe file upload is a core component of TalkJS and so we forked the plugin and added it to cater to our Flutter SDK.

Other than your users on Android being able to upload files, there's nothing to be done from your end. Remember, you can always enable or disable file attachment for a specific role through the dashboard.

We just added Link Previews to TalkJS.

For most websites, the preview will show the title and a description of the page, but for media sites like YouTube, we'll embed the media right inside the message.

If you haven't made any changes to the UserMessage or SystemMessage component of the theme you use in TalkJS, they should start working automatically. If you did already change these templates, head over to our docs to learn how to add link previews to your theme.

Improvements to the Flutter SDK

The Flutter SDK also has some new goodies in store:

• The Chatbox and ConversationList widget now accepts an onLoadingStateChanged parameter, which can notify you when the widget's content has fully loaded.
• The Chatbox widget now takes an onCustomMessageAction handler, which you can use to respond when the user triggers custom message actions.
• Fixed a scrolling issue when the Chatbox widget is placed in a bottom sheet.

Easily Set Up a Custom Domain for Emails 📧

For a long time now, TalkJS has let you use your own domain for sending emails, and handling email replies, but up until recently, this required contacting support. Now, you can easily do this yourself.

To add a custom email domain, click the account menu in the top right of the TalkJS dashboard, then click "Email domains". After adding the domain, click "details". You'll see some instructions on how to set up the necessary DNS records. Lastly, you'll want to go to the Settings page of your dashboard, and under Email Domain, select the domain you just added.

Bugfixes 🐞 

We've fixed several bugs since our last changelog entry, including:

• Fixed an issue where flag emoji wouldn't show up on Windows in most browsers
• Fixed an issue where in dark themes, the scroll bar wasn't visible.
• Fixed an issue where we sometimes sent the same email notification multiple times

TalkJS lets you build a chat feature in hours instead of months.

Added

• Capture keyboard events inside the chat UI: 
  • Added captureKeyboardEvents option 
  • Added on("keyup") event
• Added message field SDK functions: getText and typeText

Improved

• Bugfix: Users sporadically unable to send messages after seeing "Conversation not found" or creating a conversation in parallel with loading a chat UI
• Bugfix: when enterSendsMessage is true, pressing enter did not inserts a newline
• Security improvements

A major TalkJS update today! Read more background here.

New message field in 2 flavours

Emoji picker

Emoji auto-suggest

And more:

- File attachment confirmation dialog

- Better accessibility

- Better keyboard navigation

Read more on our blog.

Added

Conversation List Item component: Theme your inbox list items with the new component.

Idempotency keys: Ensure exactly-once delivery of messages - Read more.

Webhooks: message.deleted added to the webhooks list in the dashboard.

API: Fully delete participants when leaving a conversation - Read more.

Push notification tester: You can now test your push notifications via the dashboard UI.

Improved

Android Push Notifications: Priority changed to high, which helps apps that aren't running in the background.

Emojis 😲: Updated to include newer emojis.

Dashboard Settings: Improved layout to give saving settings more visible.

Improved UX for autoscrolling new messages.

Security and performance improvements.

Fixed

System messages suppressed in emails: Fixed a bug where system messages containing contact information were incorrectly being suppressed.