Channel Management

Channel Members

When a user joins a channel, they are able to observe and chat with other users in that channel. They are also automatically considered a member of that channel. The Chat SDK provides the ability to view which users are currently in the channel as well as invite other users to join the channel.

Channel Type	Discoverable by	Message sending privileges	Moderation access
Community	All users and admins	Users and admins	All Moderation tools
Live	Only members and admins	Users and admins	All Moderation tools
Broadcast	All users and admins	Admins	Admin Moderation tools
Conversation	Only members	Users	No Moderation tools

Each channel is identified by a unique channelId, which is any string that uniquely identifies the channel and is immutable through its lifetime. When creating channels, you can specify your own channelId, or leave it to Amity's Chat SDK to automatically generate one for you.

There can be only one and one only channel with a given channelId. An error will be thrown when trying to generate two channels with the same channelId.

There are three ways of obtaining a channel:

1. create

2. join

3. get

createChannel guarantees that the requested channel is a new channel, whereas joinChannel will attempt to join an existing channel. If there is a requirement to create a new channel, use createChannel then call joinChannel. Lastly, calling getChannel only gives you back the channel data, but it won't make you join the said channel.

Create Channel

TypeScriptSDK provides createChannel method to create a new channel. It supports creating of 3 types of channels Community, Live and Conversation. Each channel type has specific builder classes which helps you create that particular channel. Build your channel information first and then create the particular channel.

The above code creates a channel and notifies you through the callback.

3 channel types can be created through SDK i.e Community, Live and Conversation. Creation of Private and Standard type has been removed. Creation of Broadcast channel type is not supported through the SDK. But for query, channelCollection: method supports all channel types including Broadcast, Private and Standard.

Join Channel

joinChannel is an idempotent method. This means that it can be called multiple times throughout the lifecycle of the application, and you can expect this method to always return the same channel. Because of this, you can also use joinChannel any time you need to fetch a channel, even if you know the user may already be in the channel.

Leave Channel

Get Channel

In cases where you'd like to fetch a channel's data without joining, the getChannel method can be used:

Observe Channel

To display the channel, you may also use observeChannel

Channel Query

TypeScript SDK provides a way to query a list of channels using the queryChannels method. It returns a list of all the matching channels available.

To further query liveChannels using filter query parameters. Possible values are all, member, notMember, and flagged.

Channel Filtering

You can filter channels by various criteria such as membership and displayName.

Delete Channel

Metadata

Metadata is a general purpose data store that is automatically synchronized to all the channel members. It is meant as an elegant mechanism to store contextual information about a specific channel. The data can be any number of JSON key value pairs up to 100 kb.

Example use cases include:

• Conversation title or cover photo

• Global conversation settings

Metadata is implemented with last writer wins semantics: multiple mutations by independent users to the metadata object will result in a single stored value. No locking, merging, or other coordination is performed across multiple writes on the data.

To set metadata, call the following method:

The completion block will be triggered with the outcome of the request. The latest metadata of the channel is always exposed as part of the metadata property on the channel model.

Display Name

Every channel contains an optional displayName property. This property is mainly used to identify the channel in push notifications.

You can set a channel's displayName with the following method: