Building a Chat System – Part 5

So far on our journey to build a chat system, we’ve covered setting up the Ionic framework, creating a user in Azure Chat, adding the ability to store more messages, and implementing a way to censor offensive words. Now we will cover actually interacting with Azure Chat.

Azure Chat isn’t a full-blown component you drop into your application and run away. Think of it as a series of APIs you interact with to create a chat application.

The first thing when interacting with Azure Chat is creating an instance of the chat client.

Next, I recommend setting up notifications. This will cause the chat client to call our code when someone sends us a message or we are added to a new chat.

One of the next operations needed is creating a chat thread.

Once we have a chat thread, we can send a message.

The last would be getting the list of messages to display.

You can see all of these interactions working together here: https://github.com/chadmichel/ChadChatAngular/blob/main/src/app/chat.service.ts

If all this is doing is providing a series of APIs, why not just write everything yourself? Building all of the APIs and building them to scale for a chat application could be a massive undertaking. In most cases, it’s better to build on top of something else.

Side note: If you are interested in some fun tech diving, look at the URLs used in Azure Chat, you might notice something interesting.