remembering the last channel that was being used on startup

[rockneverdies55]

On startup application always loads the home page by default.

It would be neat if it remembered the channel I was chatting in during startup and load that channel instead of the home page.

[rodrigok]

@rockneverdies55 are you talking about the Desktop App (Electron)?

[rockneverdies55]

I guess both... on the web and desktop.

[geekgonecrazy]

Website I'd say remembering would just be a matter of them going to the same url. Electron... I'd say a feature request there and on the cordova project would be good :+1:

[marceloschmidt]

@geekgonecrazy I don't think the user wants to remember which URL he/she was at. I think what @rockneverdies55 is suggesting is that when accessing demo.rocket.chat, for instance, it should automatically redirect the user to the last visited room. In this case, we should also provide some way for the user to go back to the home screen.

[Burstaholic]

:+1: The welcome screen isn't very useful - remembering last channel would be a tremendous improvement.

[mccambridge]

+1 - I think the user wants to come back to the state they last left across the board. For instance, as a user, if I go out to lunch and have a room open on my desktop, when i open the app on my phone I would like the app to go straight to that room so I can maintain context. As a user, if I leave my work computer and pick up at my home computer, I would like the channel I had open at work to now be the channel open at home.

[thexodus]

+1 It would be really better to have this feature to save the context of the user (across all the devices). As a user, I will always prefer to see my last active chat room rather than the home screen whenever I log in.

[Prakharsvnit]

Related #4966. I had discussion with @sampaiodiego and found this. Please share your views @geekgonecrazy @marceloschmidt

[rooneyg21]

Hey guys, I am new to rocket.chat and I would like to work on / spend some time looking at this issue / feature. @Prakharsvnit wouldn't using local storage solve this only for the web since its going to be stored on the browser?

Also, @mccambridge when you say state, do you mean just the last channel I visited before closing it or the state of the channel as well, like what message you were looking at last and tell you how many messages you missed out on (like slack).

why don't we have a field in mongo db attached to the user that gets updated every time a user visits a channel. And the next time he logs in, we could redirect them to the channel that is stored in the db.

I am not sure how the structure is set up yet but just wanted to clarify somethings before I started looking into it

[JSzaszvari]

A field in mongodb that gets updated every time you change change channel like 'lastroom' or something would be the safest option

You cant do local storage as a lot of us run this in docker and don't have persistent storage

[rooneyg21]

@jszaszvari I started working on it. I added a setting in the user preferences where they can set if they want to enable this feature. And I was able to redirect the user to the channel that is read from the db. I am having trouble trying to figure out where to actually set the value in the database. I was thinking every time they visit a channel that is not equal to the current 'lastroom', lastroom = current channel .

It would help a great deal if you could tell me where I could start looking for the code to determine if they are being routed to a new room

[docsncode]

Closing as this feature is not on our short term roadmap, we will revisit once other priorities have been addressed.

[geekgonecrazy]

We should probably leave this one open. A PR is in progress here: RocketChat/Rocket.Chat#8700

[rooneyg21]

I have made the requested changes a while ago but had a hard time getting any maintainer to review it.