show uploading files in conversation

[mahibi]

uploading files should be shown in chat, including a progress indicator and a cancel button.

right now for files >1MB there is a notification with progress, for files <1MB there is no notification. for both big and small files, there should be a preview message in the chat while uploading.
maybe it makes sense to postpone this until #1552 is done.

[enakhala]

1mb file are failing to upload with V18.0.1

[woolfg]

Fully agree, there is a progress bar in the native Android Notification Panel (if you swipe down) but this is not visible in the app by default. UX wise this is quite confusing if you send a message with an attachment and you don't see any response in the UI after clicking the send button.

[woolfg]

May be fixed by #3443

[ariedov]

I don't think that is fixed, my wife sent me 3 cute pictures of my son instead of 1 because she did not understand that the picture was already sent.

While I appreciate more cute pictures, it is also clear that a progress bar for uploads is missing.

[AndyScherzinger]

Definitely still open, yes, @ariedov

[ariedov]

I have looked into it, and there are a few things to consider. It's a big one.

We treat the upload as a message (Telegram style)

1. The upload status should be another chat message, but local to the device, no one else knows an upload is happening
2. They have to survive state/activity changes
3. This means that we should "fake" the storage of the upload messages, but also
4. In case multiple uploads are happening and other messages appear, the order has to be preserved.
5. Disabled replies to the upload message, which would be crazy to support.

All uploads are a single popup.

1. This is somewhat similar to the proposed solution before
2. We do not block the UI and allow navigation
3. Except we show a little snackbar at the top of the chat window, indicating the upload progress and the number of uploads
4. Possibly a dialog shows up on the snackbar click, showing all pending uploads.

One is not necessarily easier than the other, maybe a little, but they do have a very different feel. Not sure if I would be able to pull this off, it requires messing with a number of different systems of the app, potentially causing trouble. The app does feel incomplete without the feature though...

Implementing upload-as-message

I would do it as follows, mainly to avoid altering the existing data storage

1. Create a new table for uploads
2. Create a table entry for every new upload
3. Alter the upload status from the UploadWorker
4. Reflect the updated status from the ChatViewModel/ChatActivity/ChatRepository
5. Sort the upload messages into the chat messages based on time (probably) in the ChatViewModel
6. Remove the upload entry from the new table after the upload completes
7. But store the upload failure status for reference, or potentially, retry

[mahibi]

Thanks to have a look @ariedov
Yes, it's a big one.

UI wise, the upload should be treated as a message (and additionally a notification)

On one hand, using a different DB table sounds good to sepeate things.
On the other hand, it might make sense to use the chat messages table and make use of the isTemporary attribute which indicates pending messages.
Then the same logic from OfflineFirstChatRepository#handleNewAndTempMessages could be applied to have the temporary upload messages sorted into the UI.
I don't have a final opinion on this yet..

If you are interested to delve deeper, just let us know and we can help out / discuss at any time.
Implementing would be a bit easier if we already removed chatkit and switched to Jetpack Compose, this is unfortunately not done yet..

[mahibi]

As a side note:
I just had a look how Whatsapp and telegram do it when sending a video and also sending text messages before the upload finished:

Whatsapp on sender side:
the video is shown first, and after the text messages

Whatsapp on receiver side:
the text messages are shown first, and after the video

This order remains different for sender and receiver even after a reload! (which could lead to misunderstandings depending on what is written).

For Telegram it's the same but as soon the video uploaded, it's rearranged and also the sender side will see it below the sent messages. So the same order is seen for sender and receiver side.

With the isTemporary handling in OfflineFirstChatRepository#handleNewAndTempMessages, the talk app would always rearrange a "uploading-message" so it's always below the sent messages at any time.

[ariedov]

I started a bit of an investigation and created a new table for the uploads. Nothing is too late to change, but I still feel like messing with the messages would make this too hard to finish in a reasonable time. I want to implement a basic system that does not show uploads as messages, just shows that something is uploaded, and show you guys how it looks, so we can decide if that's okay or not.

Life gets in the way though...

So far I have:

1. A new table for uploaded messages
2. The Worker updating the table

Needs to be done:

1. A UI on the chat screen that listens to the db and updates the chat screen.