SendBird: Search personal chat along with group chat

Question

SendBird treats every channel as their GroupChannel. The 1:1 chat too is technically a GroupChannel with only two users (with isDistinct = true so it would return the personal chat when you attempt to create it again).

My question is, how do I search GroupChannels by their name those include group AND 1:1 chat? The group chat would have a common name that would be shown to all the users in the group. But for 1:1 chat, the GroupChannel won't have a name, and if it has, that won't be shown to the users as for 1:1 chat, we always show the other person's name (like almost all the chat systems work).

Typically the main UI list contains mixture of the group chat and 1:1 chats (all the GroupChannels).

 --------------------------------
|    Search Chat TextField       |
|--------------------------------|
|1  John (1:1)                   |
|2  John's Birthday Plan (group) |
|3  Johnney Eve (1:1)            |
|4  Johansson Fans (group)       |
|  ...                           |
 --------------------------------

All the items are technically GroupChannel. Note that all the 1:1 chats don't have actual name as shown in the list. The name shown in the list is the other person's nickname.

Expectation:

Now, if the user searches something like "joh", then it should return all the group chats whose name contains "joh" OR all the 1:1 chats where the other person's name contains "joh". (Basically all the items shown in the above example.)

My Attempt:

My initial solution to achieve this is to keep the 1:1 channel name as <user1 nickname> & <user2 nickname>, so when the user searches for the other user by their name, the 1:1 channel would appear just like a group channel.

Example Code:

query = SBDGroupChannel.createMyGroupChannelListQuery()
query?.order = .latestLastMessage
query?.limit = 30
query?.channelNameContainsFilter = "joh"
query.loadNextPage(...)

The Problem:

The problem with this are:

1. If the user searches for their own name (or just the separator character & or just a whitespace), then too all the personal chat would be visible, which is irrelevant.
2. My system allows user to change their nickname, so every time a user changes their nickname, then all the 1:1 channel names have to be updated (which is painful).

Answer 1

Sunil,

Typically when you retrieve a list of group channels for a user, it retrieves all channels that the user is potentially a part of (Depending on the memberStateFilter).

If you were explicitly looking to search, rather than providing an ongoing list of channels the user is part of, you may be able to filter channels by userIds. You'd have to filter for a channel that consists of the searching user, and the desired user.

Lets look at an example, assuming your userId is John and you're looking for your chat with Jay:

let listQuery = SBDGroupChannel.createMyGroupChannelListQuery()
listQuery?.userIdsExactFilter = ["John", "Jay"]
listQuery?.loadNextPage(completionHandler: { (groupChannels, error) in
guard error == nil else {
    // Handle error.
}

// Only channelA is returned in a result list through the "list" parameter of the callback method.
...
})

If you wanted to explicitly use nicknames:

let listQuery = SBDGroupChannel.createMyGroupChannelListQuery()
listQuery?.nicknameContainsFilter = ["John", "Jay"]
listQuery?.loadNextPage(completionHandler: { (groupChannels, error) in
guard error == nil else {
    // Handle error.
}

// Only channelA is returned in a result list through the "list" parameter of the callback method.
...
})

You mention that you allow users to change their nicknames, and thus rooms have to be updated. It may be worth giving your group channels (even 1:1) generic names, and then dynamically generate the display name of each chat. Since each channel returns the list of members, you could look at the array of members, filter out the user that is logged in, and then pull the nickname of the remaining user from the array. This would ensure that no matter what the user changes their nickname to, its always accurate, and you don't have to update every channel when the user updates their nickname.

************ Updated 02/10 ************

Thanks for providing an example of what you're looking to achieve. It looks like you're essentially trying to search both channelNameContainsFilter and nicknameContainsFilter using the OR operator. This is not something we (Sendbird), currently support within the iOS SDK. So the question is, what could you do to achieve this?

One option would be to utilize the Platform API to obtain this information. The List my group channels has the search_query and search_fields parameters which would allow you to utilize that OR operator to find both channel names and nicknames that match your value.

Alternatively, since the SDK does return all of the necessary data that would be required to filter for these results, you could create a front-end filter that would only display the items that match your filter results. So the SDK returns the complete channel list, you store that list, and then when the user searches, you filter through the list to find channels that match your needs and display only those.

As a side note, Stackoverflow may not be the best place for this type of discussion as there is a lot of back and forth. Please feel free to join us in our community for more support.