Message Reactions

With the Message Reactions feature, you can add actions to messages that are already published. These actions can be useful for delivery acknowledgments, read receipts, and reactions such as emojis. You can provide any custom reaction as long as it's a string. You'll have to use your own emoji library as this isn't included in the PubNub SDKs.

Terminology

All message reactions in code are collectively called message reactions in the docs and the term applies both to reacting to a message (through emojis) and acting on a message (by deleting it).

Add Message reactions​

Add an action on a message (returns the added action in the response).

pubnub.addMessageAction(
  {
    channel: 'chats.room1',
    messageTimetoken: '15610547826970040',
    action: {
      type: 'reaction',
      value: 'smiley_face',
    }
  },
  function(status, response) {
    console.log(status, response);
  }
);

Receive message reactions​

To receive an action on a message, the receiving client should be listening to an event of type messageAction, and should subscribe to a channel in which the message reaction is being added. There is no need to subscribe any differently to a channel for receiving a message reaction.

Remove message reactions​

You may need to remove a previously added action on a message (returns an empty response).

pubnub.removeMessageAction(
  {
    channel: 'chats.room1',
    messageTimetoken: '15610547826970040',
    actionTimetoken: '15610547826970075',
  },
  function(status, response) {

  });

Retrieve reactions​

You can retrieve messages and the associated message reactions using History with Reactions API. You can also just retrieve the message reactions that were written in the given time interval. This can be used to retrieve all actions posted since the app went offline. Getting a list of message reactions in a channel returns a list of actions sorted by the message reaction's timetoken from the oldest to the latest.

Reactions

Message reactions can be posted on messages that were published long before the time interval in which the app was offline.

pubnub.getMessageActions(
  {
    channel: 'chats.room1',
    start: '15610547826970041',
    end: '15610547826970040',
    limit: 100,
  },
  function(status, response) {
    console.log(status, response);
  }
);

Delete messages​

There is a setting to allow delete from history requests which you must enable by checking the Enable Delete-From-History for your PubNub API Keys in the Admin Portal. In the following example, the start and end timetoken parameter values are 1/10 nanosecond (last digit of timetoken) apart to delete the message stored at the end parameter's timetoken value.

pubnub.deleteMessages(
  {
    channels: 'chats.room1',
    start: "15526611838554309",
    end: "15526611838554310",
  },
  function (status, response) {
    console.log(status, response);
  }
);

Bulk message delete​

You can also delete multiple messages or all the messages stored in a channel.

ParametersBehavior
start & end
Delete messages between those timetokens (only one message [at end timetoken] if values differ by 1)
start only
Delete all messages before (not at) that timetoken
end only
Delete all messages after (and at) that timetoken
none
Delete ALL messages
No undo option

There is no undo for the Delete Message API.

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