Messagekit: Issue with MessagesViewController as child view controller and scrolling

[ranhsd]

Hi, In one of my view controller in my project I need to display MessagesViewController below some custom UIView. What I did is in storyboard xib I created 2 UIView which act as content container for both the custom header view and the messages view controller view. Until today I used version 0.13.5 of MessageKit and everything worked as expected but today I upgrade the library from 0.13.5 to 1.0.0 and suddenly MessageInputBar hide the content inside my MessageCollectionView and I also cannot scroll to the end of the collection view.

This is how I add MessagesViewController as child view: (ChatViewController is a subclass of MessageViewController and chatContainerView is the container of it.

    lazy var chatViewController : ChatViewController! = {[weak self] in
        guard let strongSelf = self else {return nil}
        let chatViewController = ChatViewController()
        chatViewController.setInputBarStyle()
        chatViewController.messagesCollectionView.messagesDataSource = strongSelf
        chatViewController.messagesCollectionView.messagesLayoutDelegate = strongSelf
        chatViewController.messagesCollectionView.messagesDisplayDelegate = strongSelf
        chatViewController.messageInputBar.delegate = strongSelf
        strongSelf.addChildViewController(chatViewController)
        chatViewController.view.frame = strongSelf.chatContainerView.bounds
        strongSelf.chatContainerView.addSubview(chatViewController.view)
        chatViewController.didMove(toParentViewController: strongSelf)

        return chatViewController
        }()

Somebody have a clue why I have this issue after upgrading to 1.0?

Thanks.

[SD10]

Hey @ranhsd,
We changed the bottom inset calculation in 1.0.0 -- see #707 -- maybe this will help you resolve it.
Do you think you may need to account for some padding on the collectionView.contentInset.top?

[ranhsd]

Hi @SD10 I think that this change may work for part of the scenarios but not to all of them. a good option is to be able to modify the contentInset (bottom part) of the messages collection view so the scroll will have some padding

[SD10]

@ranhsd Have you tried extendedLayoutIncludesOpaqueBars = true property of MessagesViewController? Just 2 days ago I finally upgraded my app to MessageKit 1.0 -- and I set to set this to true to fix the same bug you are experiencing.

I will look into giving users better control of the bottom inset 😢

[ranhsd]

Hi @SD10 I tried it all. I finally managed to find the piece of code which is doing the troubles and this is the change:

https://github.com/MessageKit/MessageKit/pull/707/files#diff-8e002faecf437ebfd65253e8ebe13df3

What I did in my code is just change this specific code and it works now as expected. I am not saying that we simply need to go back and use this code because I assume that this change was for nothing, but I think we should make sure that the code work for all scenarios .

[ranhsd]

Hi @SD10 after some more investigations I think that it is a bug in the new code. I debug my app in both versions and saw that there is a major difference in the calculation between both. It goes like this:

1. In the new version the calculated value of messageCollectionViewBottomInset is: -138

1. In the old version the calculated value is: 46

Please notice that both results are for the same piece of code.

Thanks!

[SD10]

I'm going to tag @zhongwuzw for more info because he made this change

[nathantannar4]

@ranhsd does the issue only occur on the simulator?

_{Sent with GitHawk}

[zhongwuzw]

@ranhsd I created a ContainerViewController and try to reproduce, but it did not success, the behavior seems correctly.

Can you post a demo which I can debug? and describe the steps of reproduce, device version, iOS version?

class ContainerViewController: UIViewController {
    let chatViewController = ConversationViewController()

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()

        self.addChildViewController(chatViewController)
        chatViewController.view.frame = view.bounds
        view.addSubview(chatViewController.view)
        chatViewController.didMove(toParentViewController: self)
    }

}

[ranhsd]

Hi

@nathantannar4 it occur on both simulator and real device
@zhongwuzw the view should be part of the screen and not the all of it. So in my case I am using storyboard and have 2 views there.

1. header view - container view with height of 120
2. Chat view - located under the header view

Please notice that I am using auto-layout with constraints

Here is how to storyboard looks like (I put some color just to explain how it looks like):

So the black background is the header view and the grey one is the chat view (where I add MessagesViewController as subview)

[nathantannar4]

Are you able to create the container programmatically rather than storyboard? That could be the issue as you could be missing something

_{Sent with GitHawk}

[ranhsd]

Hi @nathantannar4 yes I can. And like I wrote above it seems that the issue is with the code because when I change back to the code of the old version it worked

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs.

[danhhgl]

Hi! I got this issue. How to solve it?

[ranhsd]

Hi @danhhgl Please read above . I was needed to replace the code manually ...

[SD10]

Sorry for the inconvenience this is causing 😭

[ranhsd]

Hi @SD10 it's fine ... You made a great library. Thank you for that!

[mglass]

Is there any progress on this? Replacing my storyboard-based code isn't really feasible.

[SD10]

@mglass We're working on something in #787

[SD10]

Should be fixed in #787 and in next release

[asn111]

Hi, Thanks for the best library for messaging, but I am still having the issue that when adding MessagesViewController into a containerView its not showing input bar. how to fix that, as I am using the latest version as per date. Help would be appriciated.

[sergeifabian]

@asn111 Same here

[dhaneshgosai]

Same issue with me also.

If I add MessagesViewController as child view in the container it's not showing input bar.

Can you guys guide me on this?

Thnaks.