Using React

Installation
To get started, you will need to install MinChat React SDK in your React app.
npm
yarn
npm install @minchat/react
yarn add @minchat/react
Creating a user
In MinChat, a User is a person that uses your app. Typically, you will have one MinChat User for each user in your own database. Each connection to MinChat has to specify the current User to send messages as.
Usually, you would create users based on the data from your database. A User is represented by a JSON object.
const currentUser = {
 id: "8843223323423other user" ,
 name: "Micheal Saunders" ,
 avatar: "urltoavatar.com/avatar.jpg" //optional
}
Initialize MinChatProvider
Import the MinChatProvider at the top of your file.
add to imports section
import { MinChatProvider } from '@minchat/react';
Wrap your chat app with the MinChatProvider passing in the currentUser and the MINCHAT_API_KEY as props. The API Key can be found on the Minchat dashboard.
<MinChatProvider
 apiKey={MINCHAT_API_KEY}
 user={currentUser}>
 
 {/* your chat app components */}
​
</MinChatProvider>
Import the useMinChat hook at the top of your file.
add to imports section
import { useMinChat } from '@minchat/react';
You can now access the MinChat SDK object.
const minchat = useMinChat()
Starting a conversation
There's not much point in a chat app with only one person using it, so let's create another User.
const otherUser = {
 id: "fc3323d3423" ,
 name: "Mercy Wells" ,
 avatar: "urltoavatar.com/mercyavatar.jpg" //optional
}
A Conversation(Chat) is a place for two or more users to chat. That could mean a simple direct message between users, or it might be something fancier. MinChat works with all kinds of conversations, from group chats to one on one conversations.
One-to-One Conversation
const chat = minchat.chat(otherUser)
You can view more details about the response and parameters here.
Group Chat
​
const chat = minchat.groupChat({name: "Epic Group Chat", members: [ otherUser , thirdUser ] })
​
You can view more details about the response and parameters here.
Get Messages
Messages retrieved in a conversation are paginated to 25 messages at a time.
add to imports section
import { useMessages } from '@minchat/react';
​
const { messages, loading , error, sendMessage , paginate , paginateLoading } = useMessages(chat)
​
You can view more details about the response and parameters here.
Send Message
To send a message, call the sendMessage(...) function from useMessages hook.
sendMessage({ text: "Hello World!" }, (error, data)=> { /** */ })
New messages received are automatically added to the messages variable of useMessages(...)
You can view more details about the response and parameters here.
Get list of conversations of current user
You can get a list of the conversations of the current user. conversations retrieved are paginated to 25 messages at a time. New conversations started by other users or messages sent to conversations that are on a different page are automatically added to the chats array.
import { useChats } from '@minchat/react';
const { chats, loading, error, paginate, paginateLoading } = useChats()
You can view more details about the response and parameters here.
​
This concludes our setup instructions for our most basic form of integration. In this short guide, you've taken your React app to the next level with powerful user-to-user chat. You also learned more about the fundamentals of MinChat, and how it all fits together. Most importantly, you've built a starting point to try out all the features MinChat offers.
For more additional features, view the Reference Docs.
Last modified 4mo ago