SystemUser for Silent Messages

[rupinderjeet]

Documentation for silent messages mentions a systemUser user instance to use when sending these messages.

If I pass a blank User() instance to it, the message is sent from current user.

I thought I could use this to show stuff like "User X added User Y" in the center. Is it not for this?

https://getstream.io/chat/docs/android/silent_messages/

[leandroBorgesFerreira]

Silent messages are just messages that don't mark the channel as unread and don't increase the count of unread messages.
If I understand correct you would like a custom type of message that you can use to notify users about some update in the channel. I believe this would be the case for a custom message.

[rupinderjeet]

Ok, thank you.

About the custom messages like this, I do not want the message to be associated with any of channel members. Will the sender user need to be someone with admin/moderator permission so that sender can send such custom messages to all the channels?

Perhaps, this user need to be maintained by a backend of some sort which monitors events happening in channels and posts these messages.

Is this right?

[leandroBorgesFerreira]

You'll need to send a system message, take a look at the message types: https://getstream.io/chat/docs/other-rest/message_format/?language=#message-types.

[zsmb13]

There are two ways of achieving this:

• Create a dedicated user for this server-side (call it a system user), and send silent messages with that user when needed. These will have the type regular, but can be rendered differently by adding custom data to them.
• Use the workaround of issuing channel updates, as described here Support sending system messages stream-chat-js#618 (comment)