nakajima
commented
1 year ago Just to add some context here, right now our RN sdk only supports one content type: Text. We want to support more content types which means we need a few things:
Step 1: Defining and consuming content types in React Native
Content types are defined by creating a ContentTypeId (see example here). We'll need to introduce that type to our React Native SDK.
Once you've got your content type, you need to define a codec so that the client knows how to serialize whatever type of content you're trying to send (in our example, Attachment is the type of content we're trying to send). Adding codec support to React Native will consist of introducing a ContentCodec interface that codecs can implement as well as its supporting types like:
EncodedContentRepresents the serialized encoded content. This is backed by a protocol buffer which enables us to send it over the networkCodecRegistryA list of codecs stored by the client, keyed by aContentTypeId. Content types must be registered before they can be used.
Step 2: Sending messages with a content type
Once the basics of content types are introduced we'll need to actually be able to use them. We'll need to modify conversations.send to take content options:
const number: number = 123
await conversation.send(number, {
contentType: ContentTypeNumber, // Assume we've defined a Number content type
contentFallback: "a string that gets used when clients don't know this type"
})This will require some changes to our native code. I think the best approach might be to expose a way to send EncodedContent directly in swift/kotlin. That way we could just use a codec react native to get EncodedContent, serialize that so that we can pass it to the native code, then the native code can send without needing to know about the codecs.
Step 3: Receiving messages with a content type
We'll need to teach the RN decodeMessage method how to deal with non-text content types. I think at a high level we can decrypt the message in the native code to get an instance of EncodedContent, then serialize it and pass it back to the RN code. This might be a bit tricky because we're just using JSON for serializing in native -> RN code and JSON doesn't support binary, but I think we can figure that out in a follow up if we just have the basics done.
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I think those are the broad strokes of what needs to happen here. Feel free to hit me up with any questions at any time!
neekolas
daria-github
Support for content types in React Native
Typescript
No native modules need to be touched for this initial step.
Test