Chat history in Spicebird

Ever worried about losing information in chat sessions when using Spicebird? You don't have to anymore. Spicebird now maintains a chat history. The latest nightly builds include this feature.

A new chat history window shows the list of all archived chat sessions. It can be opened by clicking 'Chat -> Chat History' in the 'Contacts' or 'Chats' tab.

The window has two primary sections. The left pane contains a list with each item showing the contact, date and a preview text of a chat session. The right pane shows the chat session corresponding to the item selected in the left pane.

It is possible to search through the entire chat history by entering keywords in the text box provided at the top-right. When a chat session is selected from the results, the right pane shows the chat session with all the keywords highlighted.

The 'Delete' button can be used to delete the selected chat session.

About the design

The basic premise is that chat archives could be anywhere. They could be in a different format or on a remote location or (even better) on the server. The current design enables multiple storage providers which understand the storage to be plugged into the application.

All the queries from the UI are done on a service implementing csIChatLogService. There can be multiple storage providers implementing csIChatLogStorageProvider, which register themselves to the service and advertise their properties. For basic listing or search, the chat-log service queries each provider and returns the union of all chat sessions got from each provider.

Word of caution

Though the basic functionality works fine, there can be few problems like the right pane not refreshing when a search is performed, the keyword highlighting being case-sensitive. Please understand the feature is still under development and we wanted to receive your inputs while we continue to develop it.