ChatChannelListItem no longer loading provided avatar

[ktreangen-at-ramsey]

What did you do?

Updated from version 4.60.0 to 4.62.0

What did you expect to happen?

That custom avatars provided through the following ViewFactory implementation would work as they do in 4.60.0

  @MainActor
  func makeChannelListItem(
      channel: ChatChannel,
      channelName: String,
      avatar: UIImage,
      onlineIndicatorShown: Bool,
      disabled: Bool,
      selectedChannel: Binding<ChannelSelectionInfo?>,
      swipedChannelId: Binding<String?>,
      channelDestination: @escaping (ChannelSelectionInfo) -> ChatChannelView<CustomStreamChatChannelListFactory>,
      onItemTap: @escaping (ChatChannel) -> Void,
      trailingSwipeRightButtonTapped: @escaping (ChatChannel) -> Void,
      trailingSwipeLeftButtonTapped: @escaping (ChatChannel) -> Void,
      leadingSwipeButtonTapped: @escaping (ChatChannel) -> Void
  ) -> ChatChannelListItem {
      return ChatChannelListItem(
          channel: channel,
          channelName: channelName,
          avatar: <custom UIImage here>
          onlineIndicatorShown: false,
          onItemTap: onItemTap
      )
  }

What happened instead?

Default / empty avatars are loaded within each ChatChannelListItem instead of the custom avatar that is passed through the ChatChannelListItem initializer.

GetStream Environment

GetStream Chat version: 4.62.0
GetStream Chat frameworks: StreamChatSwiftUI
iOS version: 17.5
Swift version: 5
Xcode version: 15.4
Device: Simulator

Additional context

This appears to have been introduced in 4.61.0 through the following change: e4a405e#diff-8560b06fdfd635f730bc8b770188c74f87f3f61bf566bc2568ae78954d3a0422R49.

My organization does not use any sort of remote avatars and we want to build and show these locally within our iOS application itself. If there a way to still do this in 4.61.0+ through ChatChannelListItem?

[laevandus]

Hi,

The best way for providing custom avatars is using a custom ChannelHeaderLoader.

Here is an example.
Configure your StreamChat instance like this:

let utils = Utils(
  channelHeaderLoader: CustomChannelHeaderLoader()
)
streamChat = StreamChat(chatClient: chatClient, utils: utils)

where

class CustomChannelHeaderLoader: ChannelHeaderLoader {
  override func image(for channel: ChatChannel) -> UIImage {
    UIImage(resource: .STREAMMARK) // my custom image
  }
}

Please let me know if you need any additional information.

Best,
Toomas

[ktreangen-at-ramsey]

Hello @laevandus ,

I actually tried this previously but it turns out the image(:) func is not open and therefore we cannot override it.

public func image(for channel: ChatChannel) -> UIImage

Regards,
Kurt