Introduction

Amity is a technology infrastructure provider that builds ready-to-use social features that can be easily added to any app or website, including: Chat, Profile, Forum, Feed, Video Streaming, Stories, and more.

With Amity’s white-label APIs and SDKs, companies can build thriving communities and grow user engagement, without the hassle of deploying and maintaining any server infrastructure.

Let users create engaging content and engage with others through comments and reactions. Users can follow other users or topics and become members of various groups to get a personalized timeline of content. Activity feeds are also a great feature to directly engage with users. You can communicate with your users directly by posting important messages as announcements.

Features

• Connect users through formation of communities

• Boost user engagement by user-generated posts/comments in communities

• Personalize the feed based on user’s membership to different groups and communities

Explore Our Products

Behavioral Change Announcement

We are excited to inform you about the recent updates we have made to our product to enhance your experience. These changes are scheduled for deployment as follows: 🔜 9th August: SG Region 🔜 10th August: EU & US Region. The best part is that these modifications will take effect immediately without requiring any action from your end to update the version.

Now, let's take a look at what will be changed:

1. Post creators will still have the ability to view their own soft-deleted posts.

2. Admins/Super Admins will still retain the privilege to view user's soft-deleted posts.

3. Non-Admin users, however, will no longer be able to access soft-deleted posts of other users.

4. Moderators & Global Moderators, will also no longer be able to access soft-deleted posts of other users.

Should you have any concerns or questions regarding these changes, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. We value your feedback and are here to assist you!

API Deprecation Notice: v3/files for Image Moderation

We'd like to announce that we will be deprecating v3/files API in favor of v4/images API for our image moderation feature. Effective 1 January 2024, v3/files will no longer support image moderation. If you are using v3/files to upload images, we recommend that you switch to using v4/images instead.

To ensure a smoother transition process, we have already updated the iOS and Android SDKs in version 6.6.0, as well as Flutter SDK beta 0.21.0 to point to the new endpoint for uploadImage(). Therefore, if you wish to continue using the image moderation feature, you will need to upgrade to Android or iOS SDK 6.6.0 or higher; or Flutter beta 0.21.0 before 1 January 2024. After this date, v3/files and any SDKs below the aforementioned versions will no longer support image moderation. There is no impact to TypeScript SDK users as the SDK is already using v4/images.

What this means if you wish to continue having images moderated:

• Android & iOS: You will need to upgrade to Android or iOS SDK 6.6.0 or higher (or UIKit 3.1.0 or higher), before 1 January 2024. After this date, v3/files and any SDK version below 6.6.0 (or UIKit 3.0.0 and below) will no longer support image moderation

• Flutter: You will need to upgrade to Flutter SDK beta 0.21.0 or higher, before 1 January 2024. After this date, v3/files and any SDK version below beta 0.21.0 will no longer support image moderation

If you have any concerns or questions about this deprecation notice, please do not hesitate to contact our support team.

RxJava2 and PagedList Deprecation Notice

20 October 2022

Today we are announcing the deprecation of RxJava2 and PagedList for Amity Android SDK, as we will be migrating from RxJava2 to RxJava3 and from PagedList to PagingData, effective January 1, 2023.

What this means:

• If you are using RxJava2 and PagedList, the last version that supports them (which will be released in December 2022) will continue to be maintained until 31 October 2023.

• From 1 November 2023, Rxjava2 and PagedList will no longer be supported.

Although we will not stop supporting RxJava2 and PagedList until October 2023, we recommend that you start planning your upgrade around Q4 2022, from RxJava2 to RxJava3 and from PagedList to PagingData.

Separately, we will also be upgrading our SDK to support RxJava3 and PagingData in the coming weeks. Once the upgrade is complete, we will remove RxJava2 and PagedList from future versions of the SDK.

Objective-C Deprecation Notice & Minimum Target Upgrade to iOS 13

Updated: 19 September 2022

Today we are announcing the deprecation of Objective-C for Amity iOS SDK as we will be migrating from Objective-C to pure Swift, effective 1 January 2023.

What this means:

• If you're using Objective-C to build your app, the last version that supports Objective-C (that will be published in December 2022) will continue to be maintained until 30 September 2023.

• Starting 1 October 2023, Objective-C will no longer be supported.

Although we will only be ending the support of Objective-C in October 2023, we recommend that you start planning the upgrade around Q4 2022.

Xcode 14 Upgrade & Minimum Deployment Target Upgrade from iOS 12 to iOS 13

Separately in the coming weeks, we will also be upgrading our SDK to support Xcode 14, and will be raising the minimum deployment target from iOS 12 to iOS 13. Once the minimum target upgrade occurs, we will be dropping iOS 12 & Xcode 13 support from future versions of the SDK.

What’s in store with iOS 13+ upgrade:

There are many new enhancements coming along with this upgrade, such as async/await APIs that help you to work easier with asynchronous programming. Migrating to Swift also comes as a cost-effective method in developing and maintaining your projects.

Managed UI Kit Deprecation Announcement

Updated: 21 June 2022

Amity Social Cloud will be deprecating all managed versions of the UI Kits (IOS, Android and Web J.S.) on 31 August 2022 as requests to be able to further customize their look and feel have increased. Our UI Kits were built to enable even faster integration of our social and chat features. In January this year, we open sourced all our UI Kits to provide our customers with more flexibility and greater customization options. Since then, we have seen a shift towards the open source version as it gives complete control over the visual style while keeping the integration time as short as possible.

To ensure that you continue to receive the latest updates and improvements, we encourage you to migrate over to the open source version. We’ve written instruction guides to help you migrate to the open source version, get the latest updates, and contribute to the project all available below.

What happens once the managed version UI Kit is deprecated?

Once the managed version is deprecated, we will transition our support to the open source UI Kit for any bug requests and releases of new features. You will still be able to use the managed UI Kit, however it will no longer be receiving further updates. All documentation relating to the managed UI Kit version will be moved to the deprecation notice section. Any ongoing improvements will be made to the open source version under the Lesser General Public License (GNU).

How to migrate off the managed version UI Kit?

iOS SDK Breaking Changes

Updated: 09 December 2021

From 09 Dec 2021 onwards, Amity iOS SDK will no longer maintain versions which were built with Xcode version prior to 13. and SDK v5.8 will be the first version that is built with Xcode 13 and the iOS 15 SDK.

What drove the change?

According to Apple’s announcement , "Starting April 2022, all iOS and iPadOS apps submitted to the App Store must be built with Xcode 13 and the iOS 15 SDK."

When is the deadline I need to make the change?

• From now to April 2022, you will be able to submit an app to App Store with Amity iOS SDK version prior to v5.8. but it’s highly recommended to plan the upgrade.

• From April 2022 onwards, you will NOT be able to submit an app to App Store with Amity iOS SDK version prior to v5.8

What’s the impact to my users who are currently using the app with Amity iOS SDK version prior to v5.8?

There is no impact from the functionality wise for the users who are using your App under old Amity iOS SDK. However beginning form April 2022, developers can only submit an app to App Store with the following requirement.

• Built with Xcode 13

• Built with iOS 15 SDK

• Built with Amity iOS SDK v5.8

Maintenance Strategy for Breaking Changes

Updated: 27 April 2021

• and UIKit 1.12 will be the last version to contain the prefix Eko. New features WILL NOT be added to these older versions any longer.

• We will only maintain these older versions for critical issues and bug fixes. Whenever a hot-fix is made available, it will be rerouted back to historical ASC SDK & UIKit, respectively, regardless of the current latest versioning.

• Amity Social Cloud's SDK 5.0 and UIKit 2.0 will be introduced as a modularized category of changes and advancement. New features will only be added to these versions and those to come, above i.e. v5.1, v5.2 and so on and so forth.

You can find more information about these changes in the respective changes for each platform, which you can access using the links below.

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Follow / Unfollow Limited Availability Announcement

Updated: 26 April 2021

After the launch of our Amity Social features that allow customers around the world to build their own social network and grow their own community of users within the safety net of their own brands, our customers and the community they have built has grown much quicker than we originally anticipated - from building a community of travelers to engaging sports-fans around the world.

In order to handle the massive spike in workloads from the growing number of customers while making sure our system always perform at the highest standard from both data latency and scalability aspects, we have decided to revert Follow and Unfollow features into Limited Availability release.

The feature will be temporarily unavailable to all new customers while we work on upgrading our infrastructure and underlying deployment architecture. Starting from 26 April 2021, new SDK downloads will no longer contain follow/unfollow function and newly-generated API key will not be able to use the features. User profile, groups and feed features will remain unaffected. Existing customers who are already using the feature should also remain unaffected.

Our priority is to ensure we scale our system architecture to meet the increasing demand from our existing customers who are using the system to actively grow their community. Our engineering team is working to bring these features back to General Availability release by June 2021. Thank you for your understanding and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused to our onboarding customers.

iOS SDK Breaking Changes

Updated: 08 December 2020

From 1st Feb 2021 onwards, Amity iOS SDK will no longer maintain versions which were built with Xcode version prior to 12, and v4.2 will be the first version with Xcode 12 support. Please kindly plan ahead and upgrade your iOS SDK version if you are using the versions prior to v4.2

What drove the change?

According to Apple’s announcement , "Starting April 2021, all iOS and iPadOS apps submitted to the App Store must be built with Xcode 12 and the iOS 14 SDK."

When is the deadline I need to make the change?

• From now to 31st Jan, no impact but it’s highly recommended to plan the upgrade.

• From 1st Feb onwards, Amity will no longer provide customer support regarding iOS SDK versions prior to v4.2

• From 1st Feb to 31st Mar, you will still be able to submit an updated version to App Store with Amity iOS SDK version prior to v4.2

What’s the impact to my users who are currently using the app with Amity iOS SDK version prior to v4.2?

There is no impact from the functionality wise for the users who are using your App under old Amity iOS SDK, but they will NOT be able to get any further updated version from App Store unless you submit a new version which is :

• Built with Xcode 12

• Built with iOS 14 SDK

• Built with Amity iOS SDK v4.2

I want to upgrade Amity SDK but how do I know the changes between my current SDK version and the latest version?

Please refer to this section for details.

Installation

Add the SDK to your repository via npm: npm install @amityco/js-sdk --save.

Installing the SDK requires you to use a javascript package manager such as npm

Our Core Concepts section will outline functionality and information that is pertinent to all of our Chat SDK Modules.

The following concepts are shared across all platforms and thus are centralized in this section for your ease of navigation and use.

The SDK offers push notification settings per channel, allowing users to configure whether to enable or disable push notifications for specific channel. This configuration applies universally to every device logged in as the same user.

Get Channel Push Notification Settings

The SDK provides "getSettings()" function within Channel Notification to check whether push notification is enabled on the channel.

Installation

Add the SDK to your repository by adding amity_sdk depedency

With Flutter:

This will add a line like this to your package's pubspec.yaml (and run an implicit flutter pub get

The SDK has three levels of notifications and in order for it to be sent, a notification has to pass throughout all three levels.

• Network Level: (via Admin Panel) turning off notifications at this level effectively disable push notifications altogether for all of your customers.

• User Level: (via client) A user can choose to enable/disable notifications per feature module. Please note that this setting is per user, not per device: regardless of which device sets this toggle, the new preference will take effect in all the devices where the user is logged in.

Amity’s customer-centric nature ensures that security needs are kept at the forefront of the work we do. Our purpose has been to continuously develop features that are safe and ready to use. We power our moderators with tools to control and impose permissions that make their applications a safer place, for all users. We put the utmost importance on giving power to our clients to implement protocols that keep their applications healthy, safe and compliant.

ChannelModeration class provides various methods to moderate the users present in channel. You can ban/unban users, assign roles or remove them from a user.

Installation

Add the SDK to your repository with this code:

npm:

yarn:

Getting Started

The very first thing to do once you have installed the SDK, is to creating an instance of the client and logging in.

Once the client has been instantiated and you are logged in. You can now use API's to create a , , and !

Browser Support

• Chrome: 38+

• Firefox: 42+

• Microsoft Edge: 13+

Since Amity Web SDK uses local cache for performance and user experience reasons, server side rendering is not supported. To use Amity Web SDK with NextJS, Amity Web SDK must be imported using .

React Native Framework

Use our TypeScript SDK natively to support your applications built using the React Native framework.

In order to support older JavaScript runtime, you need to include a global polyfill for your bundled package.

First, install core-js in your project.

Then, import fromEntries in the root of your project.

In Amity SDK, creating a new user can be done through the login method. Once the user account has been created, the user can then log into the app using their userId and displayName using the SDK's social and chat features.

You may need to create a new user account via the SDK, such as when integrating the SDK with an existing user authentication system. In these cases, you can use the login method. Here's how the login method works:

• If a user already exists for the specified userId, the SDK will log the user into the app using the provided userId. The displayName parameter can be updated upon calling the login method. If the displayName parameter is not provided, the system will retain the existing user's displayName.

• If a user account does not already exist for the specified userId, the SDK will automatically create a new user account with the provided displayName and log the user into the app. If displayName is not provided, the userId will be used as displayName.

API token management is a login authentication process that allows an amity user to access amity applications in a unified and streamlined environment.

Amity SDK provides AmityUserTokenManager to manage user credentials. This includes an access token that can be used to access some Beta features.

Create a User Token

To create a new user token, refer to the following example and the parameters are.

• userId: This is a required parameter of type String that represents the unique identifier of the user whose credentials are being managed by the AmityUserTokenManager.

• displayName : This is an optional parameter of type String that represents the display name of the user. If provided, it will be associated with the user's credentials.

File upload and download are key features of our product, which enable developers to easily incorporate file-sharing functionality into their applications. With support for a wide range of file types, including images, videos, audio, and documents, developers can create highly engaging and interactive user experiences that drive engagement and increase retention. The maximum file size of a file regardless of its type is 1 GB.‌

By enabling users to share files directly within the chat or social feed, developers can create highly personalized and engaging experiences that foster deeper connections among users. For example, users can share photos and videos with friends and family, or exchange documents and other files within a community. To support various use cases and make it easy to handle files, images, and videos, we offer convenient methods for managing these types of content:

• File Handling

In the context of channels, subchannels, and message collections, receiving real-time events is an automatic process for conversation and community channels; you do not need to perform any additional actions. However, for a live channel still needs to be established.

Similar to the process for social real-time events, a topic is a unique path that must be constructed for each model you wish to receive updates about in real-time. The SDK offers helper methods for creating these topics for each model type. Each topic includes an events enum that developers can select to subscribe to, based on their business context and preferences.

To receive updates from a channel or any content created within that channel, the user must hold 'Member' status within that channel. Once the user leaves the channel, they will no longer receive real-time events.

Subchannel Topic

d

The SDK offers push notification settings per community, allowing users to configure which notification events should be enabled on the community. This configuration applies universally to every device logged in as the same user.

Configurable events include POST_CREATED, POST_REACTED, COMMENT_CREATED, COMMENT_REACTED, COMMENT_REPLIED, STORY_CREATED, STORY_REACTED, STORY_COMMENT_CREATED

Get Community Push Notification Settings

The SDK provides "getSettings()" function within Community Notification to inspect which notification events are enabled on the community.

Update Community Push Notification Settings

The SDK provides "enable()" function where user can choose which notification events to be enabled on the community and "disable()" function to disable all notification events on the community.

The presence heartbeat is a mechanic to signal the system whether a user is online or offline. The SDK offers two convenient methods that allow users to periodically sync or unsync their presence status with the server. When the server receives a heartbeat sync request, it records the timestamp at the time of the request, designating it as the lastHeartbeat timestamp for that user.

The SDK automatically manages the periodic syncing of this heartbeat once the startHeartbeat method is called. To cease syncing your presence with the server, the user must invoke the stopHeartbeat method.

Start Heartbeat

Invoke the startHeartbeat method in client.presence to initiate the heartbeat synchronization process. This method automatically checks the user's presence settings within the network, and if enabled, begins to sync the heartbeat at specified intervals defined in the SDK. The synchronization process is handled automatically, streamlining the user's interaction with the system.

Stop Heartbeat

Utilize the stopHeartbeat() method within client.presence to cease the heartbeat synchronization process. To restart the sync, you must invoke the startHeartbeat() method again.

Get a Channel

The function allows users to retrieve information about a specific channel using the channelId parameter. This function returns a Live Object of the AmityChannel class, which contains information such as the channel's display name, tags, avatar, and other metadata.

This function is useful for a variety of purposes, such as displaying information about a channel to users or retrieving channel details before joining the channel.

User Unread Count

This function enables users to obtain the current user's total count of unread messages and their mention status across all channels and sub-channels. To retrieve this value, utilize the CoreClient and follow the code pattern below.

To ensure that the message read count is up to date for a subchannel, users need to start reading the sub channel. When a user opens a subchannel, the chat system updates the read count for all messages in that channel, based on the user's reading status. This feature is designed to provide accurate read counts for sub channels, ensuring that users have a clear understanding of which messages have been read and which are still unread

Start reading a sub channel

Active reading of a subchannel and letting the chat system know that reading status can update the message read count in that sub channel. The system will update the read count for all messages in the sub channel that the user has not yet read.

Stop reading a sub channel

To maintain an accurate message read count, users should stop reading a sub channel when they have finished reading it. The chat system updates the read count based on the user's reading status, so if a user leaves a sub channel, they should stop reading to avoid reading new messages.

The SDK offers push notification settings per user, allowing users to configure whether to enable or disable push notifications for specific feature modules. This configuration applies universally to every device logged in as the same user.

Configurable modules include CHAT, SOCIAL, and LIVE_STREAM.

Get User Push Notification Settings

The SDK provides "getSettings()" function within User Notification to inspect the current settings of each feature module.

Update Push Notification Settings

The SDK provides "enable()" function where user can specify the settings of each module and "disableAll()" function where user can choose to disable notifications on every module.

Mark Channel as Read

Clearing all unread counts in a channel is a useful feature that allows users to easily keep track of their message history. To accomplish this, the SDK provides a convenient method to mark all messages within a channel as read, effectively clearing the unread count. This method can be called by invoking the markAsRead() function on the ChannelRepository class with the appropriate channelId parameter.

Once called, the function will iterate through all messages in subchannels within the specified channel and mark each as read. This process will clear the unread count.

Please note that clearing unread counts in a channel only applies to the specified channel and does not affect any other channels or subchannels. Additionally, clearing unread counts does not delete any messages or modify their content in any way. It simply updates their status to reflect that they have been read by the user.

The unread count feature in chat channels and subchannels allows you to keep track of new messages and stay up-to-date with ongoing conversations. By providing a simple indicator of unread messages, users can quickly prioritize which channels require their attention. This topic provides instructions for managing unread messages in a chat channel and sub-channel.

Unread Count Syncing

To enable the unread message count feature on the device, the user must start unread count syncing. This ensures that the user, as well as all channels and subchannels, have an up-to-date message unread count. To disable this feature, users simply stop the unread count syncing, which will stop updating the message unread count from their device.

Start unread count syncing

To start unread count syncing, you can use the following code:

Stop unread count syncing

To stop unread count syncing, you can use the following code:

SDK now supports querying channels based on provided channel IDs. The ChannelRepository class includes a getChannels method that takes an array of channel IDs as input and returns a live collection of channels. This live collection will contain all the channels that are being queried in the first page. This live collection will not support pagination.

Any update to the channels present in this live collection will be automatically notified to the user. Furthermore,

• This live collection will only contain valid channels. In case of invalid channels (such as user gets banned etc.) the list may exclude those channels.

• If any channel id is invalid, live collection will throw error.

Limitations:

If the channel is not public and user leaves the channel, the channel will still remain in the live collection until user refresh or resets the live collection.

Channel unread count

The SDK provides a simple way for clients to retrieve the unread count for a channel. To view the unread count for a channel, we can get it from a channel object. This count represents the number of messages that you have not yet read in that channel.

Check unread count support for channel

To check if a channel supports the Unread Count feature, you can use the following code:

Channel Mention Status

To get the mention status of the current user in a channel, developers can use the following code.

Subchannel Mention Status

To get the mention status of the current user in a sub channel, developers can use the following code.

In order to send or receive push notifications using our SDK, you would need to create push notification certificates from Apple Developer Console & Upload in our Amity console.

Here are the steps to generate push notification certificate from Apple Developer Console.

Step 1:

Ionic Framework

We now support the Ionic framework in building your application using our web SDK. You can use our Chat natively to support your mobile or web applications built using the Ionic framework.

Since Ionic is an HTML5 framework, it needs a native wrapper to access native SDK functionalities and run as a native app. We recommend using Capacitor.

Capacitor will wrap your application in a native container so you can easily integrate our web SDK to run on iOS, Android, and web platforms.

Live Objects and Live Collections are observable data holders. The observer gets updated when there is a change of data in the local cache.

There are two main sources that can make changes to the object and collection:

• When an object gets updated by an action from the current device.

• Real-time events of the subscribed objects from the server.

Push notifications are small pop-up messages triggered by an application, even when the application is not open. Push notifications are an essential part of social features that a customer must provide to their end users.

Webhook

Clients who want to have the push notifications delivered to their own servers first in order to customise before it reaches their users, can opt for this method.

In this solution, events are sent from Amity’s servers to the client’s servers via webhook. Clients can decide what to do with each events before it reaches the end user's device as notification. Clients have the ability to edit the notifications (i.e: translate the message), filter them (based on specific use case or user preferences), and perform analytics before sending them to the users. With this new feature, clients can also have notifications for web apps.

Overview

Presence state is a vital aspect of any modern application, acting as a driving factor for engagement products by showing the user's current availability. The AmitySDK supports both observing and notifying the presence of users, analogous to being online and observing users' online statuses.

Initialize Push Notification

FCM dependency:

Before you can start receiving push notifications, you need to obtain a FCM unique token string that identifies each FCM client app instance:

Update a Channel

The updateChannel function allows users to modify the properties of a channel. This function is useful in cases where a channel's details need to be updated, such as changing the channel's display name or avatar.

The function takes a channelId parameter as a required input, which specifies the channel to be modified. Additionally, users can pass in any number of optional parameters to update the channel's properties. These optional parameters include:

Live Objects and Live Collection

In Flutter SDK, we have a concept of Live Object and Live Collection. Live Object is represented by StreamSubscription<Object> instance and LiveCollection is represented by an instance of LiveCollection. LiveCollection is a generic class that encapsulates any other object and notifies the observer whenever any property of encapsulated object changes. Live Object helps to observe changes in a single object whereas Live Collection helps to observe changes in a list of objects. For example:

Query Channel Members

The ability to search for and query members within a chat channel is an essential feature for creating a seamless and engaging user experience. With Amity Chat SDK, developers can use the query member feature to allow users to search for and retrieve member information within a channel. We will discuss how to use the query member feature of Amity Chat SDK to enable users to search and retrieve member information within a chat channel.

For the specified channel, the list of users will be sorted by as a lastCreated default parameter. Users can also choose to sort by lastCreated

Mark Message as Delivered

When you send a message to someone, it's important to know whether that message has been delivered to the recipient's device or not. This is where the "Mark message delivered" function comes in.

By calling this function, you can update the status of a message to "delivered", which indicates that the message has been successfully delivered to the recipient's device. This can be useful for ensuring that important messages have been received by the intended recipient.

The parameters for this function are:

Send a Custom Message

If you'd like to display content on your app that cannot be represented by the available text, image, video, and file message types, you can create your own custom message type. Custom message type allows you to include the necessary data for rendering, such as additional metadata and custom data formatting. This is useful if you want to present specific types of content to your users.

Here is a brief explanation of the function parameters:

Client Registration

Registering your app for push notification will require a registered AmityClient instance (necessary to know which user is associated with this device) and a push notification token.

Amity's Development Kit does not manage:

The SDK provides a simple way for clients to retrieve the unread count for a sub channel. To view the unread count for a sub channel, we can get it from a sub channel object. This count represents the number of messages that you have not yet read in that sub channel.

Check unread count support for sub channel

In addition to creating top-level messages, Amity Chat SDK also allows you to reply to existing messages. To reply to a message, you'll need to specify the parent message's parentMessageId as one of the parameters. This allows the SDK to associate the new message as a reply to the parent comment.

Similar to creating a top-level message, you can use the SDK's optimistic creation feature to create a reply message.

Search Channel Members

The searchMembers function in the AmityChannelParticipation class is used to search for members in a channel when mentioning. It takes the following parameters:

The function returns a of ChannelMember

Text posts are a simple yet powerful way to create and share text-based content with other users on our platform. With the Amity Social SDK, users can quickly and easily create text posts and add them to a user's or community's feed. As demonstrated in the code sample below, you can simply include the text data as a parameter when creating a text post.

Here's an explanation of the method's parameters:

• text: This is a required parameter of type String, which represents the text content of the new post. You can pass in any text you want to include in the post, up to a maximum length of 20,000 characters.

Amity SDK provides developers with a powerful set of tools for creating a wide range of post types with support for a broad range of content formats, users can create highly dynamic and engaging posts that help to drive user engagement and increase retention, including:

In the Amity SDK, a user is represented by an AmityUser object, which contains the user's unique userId and displayName. The userId is an immutable value that is assigned to a user when their account is created, and cannot be changed afterwards. This value serves as a unique identifier for the user within the SDK, and is used to perform actions such as sending messages or creating connections between users.

To retrieve an AmityUser object for a specific userId, you can use the getUser method provided by the UserRepository. This method accepts the userId as a parameter and returns a of AmityUser. The live object allows developers to observe changes to the user's properties in real-time, ensuring that their app remains up-to-date with the latest user information.

To retrieve multiple users, you can use getUserByIds method provided by UserRepository. This method accepts a collection of userId as a parameter and returns a ofAmityUser.

Flag / Unflag User feature is an essential tool for maintaining a safe and engaging chat community. With Amity Social Cloud, you can use the flag and unflag user feature to allow moderators and administrators to monitor any inappropriate behavior within a chat channel.

In this section, we will discuss how to use the flag and unflag user feature of Amity Chat SDK to maintain a safe and engaging chat community.

To flag / unflag users on iOS, Android and Flutter SDK, create an instance of UserFlagger first:

let userRepository: AmityUserRepository = AmityUserRepository(client: client)

The UserFlagger lets you flag and unflag a user. It also exposes an asynchronous way to check whether the current logged-in user has already flagged the given user or not.

Flag a User

To flag a user, call the following method:

Unflag a User

To unflag a user, call the following method:

Check Flagged By User

To check whether a user has been flagged by the current user:

Moderators can ban and unban users. When a user is banned in a channel, they are forcibly removed from the channel and may no longer participate or observe messages in that channel. All their previous messages in the channel will also be automatically deleted.

A user that has been banned from a channel can not rejoin the channel until they have been unbanned.

Global Ban

As well as the banning and unbanning of users, admins also have the ability to global ban a user. When a user is globally banned, they can no longer access Amity's network and will be forcibly removed from all their existing channels. All the globally banned user's messages will also be deleted.

The globally banned user can not access Amity's network again until they have been globally unbanned.

Ban Users

Banning members is a more heavy-handed moderation method. When a user is banned, all its messages are retroactively deleted, it will be removed from the channel, and it will not be allowed to join the channel again until he is explicitly unbanned.

Unban Users

Send a Video Message

Video messages allow users to share videos within a chat or social platform. This could be anything from a quick clip to a longer, more detailed video. With the Amity SDK, developers can easily integrate video message functionality into their apps, allowing users to record, upload, and share videos in real-time.

To send a video message, you must pass a valid local file URL instance instead. You can also specify an optional caption as part of the message. This caption is accessible via the data property in the message model under the caption or text key. You can add up to 1,000 characters of text per message. When a video is uploaded, it is automatically resized to the maximum size of 480p.

For further information regarding a video information please refer to page.

Here is a brief explanation of the function parameters:

• text/caption: A string that contains the text message that the user wants to send. This parameter is mandatory as it contains the actual message content.

• attachment: The local video path that the user wants to send on the device

This method is useful when there is a large number of messages going through the channel, which can make the message stream hard to follow. Setting a rate limit enables the SDK to queue up messages once the number of message in a specified window exceeds the defined limit, allowing a slower stream of messages to be published to the user at the expense of adding more latency (because newer messages will be sent to the queue first and not delivered until all previously queued messages are delivered).

There is an internal limit of 1000 messages that can be queued by the rate limit service, if more than 1000 messages are queued up, the system may skip publishing the older messages in order to make room for newer messages. We believe this is the preferred behavior for users, as users will most likely want to see newer messages in a real-time conversation instead of waiting for a significant amount of time for old messages to be published to them first.

Note that the SDK permanently stores all messages it receives in the system before the rate limit comes into effect: in the case of a large spike of incoming messages, even if a message did not get published to a user in real-time, that user can still scroll up to see message history and see that past message.

The above method enables a rate limit of 5 messages every 60 seconds: once there are more than 5 messages sent, from any user, within 60 seconds, those messages will be queued on the server and not published to other channel members until 60 seconds have passed. The rate limit will last as long as the period specified in the method call: in the example above the rate limit will be active for 10 minutes (600 seconds).

If you would like to have a permanent rate limit, call the method above with a period of -1 seconds.

In order to disable the rate limit, simply call removeRateLimitWithCompletion:

Prior to creating an image post, it is crucial to upload the images that will be included in the post data to ensure that the necessary information is accessible and can be linked to the post. This requires uploading the image first, to obtain the image data that will be used in creating the image post. To upload an image, please refer to Upload Images.

Upon successful completion of the image upload process, you can include the image data as a parameter when creating an image post, as demonstrated in the code sample below.

Here's an explanation of the method's parameters:

• text: This is a required parameter of type String, which represents the text content of the new post. You can pass in any text you want to include in the post, up to a maximum length of 20,000 characters.

• images: Which represents an array of images uploaded by the user on Android, iOS and Flutter and imageIds for Typescript and Javascript to include in the new post. You can pass up to 10 images in a post.

• targetType - Type of the target, either a particular community or a user feed.

• tags - Arbitrary strings that can be used for defining and querying for the posts.

• metaData - Additional properties to support custom fields.

Amity uses roles and permissions to provide users the ability to fully customize moderation experience on the platform. To learn more about Amity SDKs default roles and permissions, refer to Roles & Permissions page.

Roles

Creator of the channel can add and remove the role of user via AmityChannelModeration.

Permission

You can check your permission in channel by sending AmityPermission enums to AmityCoreClient.hasPermission(amityPermission).

Moderators can mute and unmute users. When a user is muted, they cannot send messages in a channel. However, muted users will still be allowed to observe messages in a channel. The status of being muted is indefinite but is only applied at the channel level. The mute and unmute operations can be done viaChannel object.

Muting Channel Members

When a user is muted, they cannot send messages in a channel and all the messages sent by that user to that channel will be rejected. This method is useful for preventing certain members from sending inappropriate messages, but still allowing them to participate in the conversation in a read-only manner. The timeout property allows you to make the timeout temporary, or permanent until unset by passing in -1.

Unmuting Channel Members

Prior creating a video post, it is crucial to upload the videos that will be included in the post data to ensure that the necessary information is accessible and can be linked to the post. This requires uploading the video first, to obtain the video data that will be used in creating the video post. To upload a video, please refer to

Upon successful completion of the video upload process, you can include the video data as a parameter when creating a video post, as demonstrated in the code sample below.

Here's an explanation of the method's parameters:

• text: This is a required parameter of type String, which represents the text content of the new post. You can pass in any text you want to include in the post, up to a maximum length of 20,000 characters.

• videos: Which represents an array of videos uploaded by the user on Android, iOS and Flutter and videoIds for Typescript and Javascript to include in the new post. You can pass up to 10 videos in a post.

• targetType - Type of the target, either a particular community or a user feed.

• tags - Arbitrary strings that can be used for defining and querying for the posts.

• metaData - Additional properties to support custom fields.

Requirements for Video

• Supported video types are 3gp, avi, f4v, flv, m4v, mov, mp4, ogv, 3g2

Prior to creating a file post, it is crucial to upload the files that will be included in the post data to ensure that the necessary information is accessible and can be linked to the post. This requires uploading the file first, to obtain the file data that will be used in creating the file post. To upload a file, please refer to

Upon successful completion of the file upload process, you can include the file data as a parameter when creating a file post, as demonstrated in the code sample below.

Here's an explanation of the method's parameters:

• text: This is a required parameter of type String, which represents the text content of the new post. You can pass in any text you want to include in the post, up to a maximum length of 20,000 characters.

• files: Which represents an array of files uploaded by the user on Android, iOS and Flutter and fileIds for Typescript and Javascript to include in the new post. You can pass up to 10 files in a post.

• targetType - Type of the target, either a particular community or a user feed.

• tags - Arbitrary strings that can be used for defining and querying for the posts.

• metaData - Additional properties to support custom fields.

The use of images as a visual representation of information is crucial in many software applications. Our SDK provides the tools and functionality needed to easily handle images. In this section, we will introduce you to image handling in Amity, including how to upload and retrieve images in the SDK.

Image Data

Search User

Query for users by their display name, receiving a collection of AmityUser matching your search. It requires two parameters: the display name you're searching for, and a 'sort option' from the AmityUserSortOption enum. If no keyword is supplied, the list of users will be organized alphabetically by display name.

Users also have the option to sort by lastCreated

Send a Text Message

In a chat application, it's essential to send text messages to each other in real-time, allowing for quick and easy communication. Users can also view previous messages sent and received within the chat, allowing them to reference past conversations as needed.

The sendTextMessage function is a feature provided by the Amity chat SDK that enables users to send plain text messages in a . This function requires two parameters: text

Reading Status and Unread Count

The ChannelRepository object exposes a totalUnreadCount property that reflects the number of messages that the current user has yet to read. This count is the sum of all the unreadCount channels properties where the user is already a member.

Send a File Message

A file message is a type of message that allows users to share files with each other within a chat or messaging app. This can include documents, images, videos, and other types of files. To send a file message, the user simply selects the file they want to share and sends it through the app.

When a user receives a file message, they can view or download the file directly within the app. This makes it easy for users to share important files and collaborate with each other without having to switch between different applications or email clients.

Join a Channel

The joinChannel function allows users to join a channel, making them a member of the channel. This function takes one parameter, channelId, which is the ID of the channel that the user wishes to join.

Once the user joins the channel, they will be able to participate in conversations and receive updates about the channel's activity. It is important to note that this function is idempotent, which means that it can be called multiple times without causing any issues. If the user has already joined the channel, a successful result will still be returned.

Query Channels

The getChannels function is a powerful function that allows you to search for and retrieve channels that match specific criteria. With this function, you can quickly and easily find the channels you need.

The function accepts several parameters that allow you to customize your search. The keyword parameter is a string that specifies the search query, allowing you to search for channels based on their displayName

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Amity Social SDK allows engineers to integrate social communities and user feed capabilities without the hassle of deploying and maintaining any server infrastructure. Companies can now build user-powered social news feeds and notifications into their mobile and web app in no time. Enabling you to engage your customers with the same tools used by many of the popular social applications.

Let users create engaging content and engage with others through comments and reactions. Users can follow other users or topics and become members of various groups to get a personalized timeline of content.

Activity feeds are also a great feature to directly engage with users. You can communicate with your users directly by posting important messages as announcements.

Mentions allow users to tag other users in messages, comments, and posts. It's a powerful tool for fostering engagement and collaboration within your social application. With mentions, users can easily direct messages to specific individuals or groups and can alert them to new content or important updates. In the SDK, mentions can be implemented in a range of ways, depending on your application's needs and user experience. Here are the models that support mentions creation and highlighting:

• Mention in Post

you have the flexibility to define your own mention data structure for representing mentions. This allows you to highlight mentioned text in a way that best suits the needs of your application and users. The most important aspect of mentions is to notify users when they have been mentioned, regardless of the specific data structure used. This ensures that users are able to quickly and easily engage with the content that is most relevant to them.

Mention Users

Upon creating a model above (a post, comment, or message) with a mention, you can include a JSON object in the metadata parameter. The metadata represents the mention object, which depends on the design of your data structure. However, Amity provides a default structure to help you create the mention metadata.

To ensure prompt notification of the person mentioned, it's important to provide the list of user IDs for the mention users parameter. This will help ensure that the mentioned users are notified and able to engage with the content.

• mentionUsers(userIds) - In order to mention users and notify specific users. This function supports all mentionable models.

• mentionChannel(channelId) - In order to mention and notify the whole channel. This function supports only a message model.

Default Mention Metdata Structure

To represent mentions using our structure, you will need to utilize the AmityMention object. This object can be created during mentionable model creation, as well as during rendering. The model contains of four properties:

• type - type of the mention - the possible types are user and channel, for post and comment only support mentioning user but message supports mention channel additionally.

• index - start index of current mention

Mention Users Example

Below is an example to create a comment with mentions by using our default mention metadata structure:

Render Mentions

As we mentioned that we provided the flexibility for you to define your own mention object data structure to represent mentions. You can use the default data structure provided by the SDK to render mentions in your application, which can be accessed through the helper class. This allows you easily retrieve mentions and render them. The mentionable model contains properties related to the mention feature:

• mentionUsers - The AmityUser object array contains details about users mentioned in the current content.

• metadata - a flexible JSON object which can accommodate any information regarding the mentioned users. Our predefined structure for representing mentions is also in the metadata property.

Below is an example to render mentions in a comment by using our default mention data structure:

Mention Notifications

When users are being mentioned, they will receive push notifications. You can customize the push notification content such as the title and the body using the . Providing the notification title and body in the titleTemplate and bodyTemplate parameters respectively. Here is a sample model:

The SDK also offers functionality to query and synchronize the presence of other users, enabling the creation of a UI that displays their online status. For example, you might use a green dot to indicate whether a particular user is online or offline.

Within the SDK, a user's presence is represented by the AmityUserPresence object, which contains three properties.

Query User Presence

The SDK enables users to query the presence state for a list of users, with a maximum limit of 220. The getUserPresence method from the AmityUserPresenceRepository class can be used to fetch a list of AmityUserPresence objects.

Sync & Unsync User Presence

In addition to querying user presence, the SDK also offers a method to periodically sync the presence of other users. This functionality keeps users informed about the online status of others. One application of this feature would be to display a list of users and provide an online indicator for those who are currently online.

Sync User Presence

The SDK includes the syncUserPresence(id, viewId) method in the AmityUserPresenceRepository class to synchronize the presence of another user. This method adds the specified ID to the list of user IDs for presence synchronization, occurring periodically at set intervals. To observe the results of this process, use the getSyncingUserPresence() method. When presence information is obtained for the currently syncing user IDs, notifications are sent through the observer returned from the getSyncingUserPresence() method. For further details on observing presence, refer to the section.

For optimal use, particularly when displaying a list of users, call this method as a list item appears to synchronize the user's presence state. Conversely, utilize the unsyncUserPresence(id, viewId) method to stop synchronization when a list item is no longer visible, ensuring that the maximum sync limit is never reached.

This syncUserPresence(id, viewId) method also provides an optional viewId parameter. viewId is the unique id of the view that this user id is tied to. In most of the cases, you do not need to specify any value to this parameter. viewId is useful if you want to bind same user id to multiple views in same screen. In that case, if you want to unsync presence for one view, it won't affect presence syncing for same user id in another view.

Unsync User Presence

The SDK includes the unsyncUserPresence(id, viewId) method to cease syncing the presence of a specific user ID. When a user ID is unsynced, the SDK removes it from the current list of synced IDs, and the observer returned from the getSyncingUserPresence() method will no longer provide presence information for that user. The method also features an optional viewId parameter, functioning similarly to the syncUserPresence(id, viewId) method.

The SDK also provides a convenient method to unsync all user ids which are currently being synced. This is particularly useful when you don’t care about the user ids being synced. One usecase for this is when user navigates to another screen which do not care about syncing previously synced users at all. So you can call unsyncAllUserPresence() method when the previous screen disappears.

Observe User Presence