Introducing attachments for Comments

In today’s digital landscape, users expect more than just text-based communication. The ability to share files, images, and other media with colleagues is essential for a complete collaborative experience, and without it, users will fall back to email, Slack, or other file-sharing tools.

To address this need, we’re excited to introduce a powerful new feature in Liveblocks 2.8—attachments for Comments. By upgrading Liveblocks, you can integrate this into your collaborative application in minutes, instantly boosting user engagement and interaction.

Overview

• Out of the box attachments - Enabled in our React components by default.
• Build attachments your way - Use primitives to create custom attachment UIs.
• Attachments in the dashboard - Inspect users’ attachments on our website.

Upgrade now

Add Comments attachments to your application in just a few minutes by following our upgrade guide for Liveblocks 2.8.

Out of the box attachments

Our React components in Comments and Text Editor now allow you to attach files to comments, and this is enabled by default. Users can upload files using the file picker, or by dragging/pasting files into the composer.

All files types are supported, and our Pro plan allows individual files up to 50MB in size. When clicking on attachments, each type of file uses its default browser behavior—usually opening media in a new tab, or downloading the file.

It’s possible to customize this behavior using the onAttachmentClick prop on Thread. For example below, we’re cancelling the default behaviour, and instead calling custom methods to download the file and display a toast notification.

<Thread  key={thread.id}  thread={thread}  onAttachmentClick={({ attachment, url }, e) => {    e.preventDefault();
    // Custom behavior on click    __downloadFile__(url);    __toast__(`${attachment.name} has been downloaded`);  }}/>

Attachments are optional and can also be disabled, make sure to read our upgrade guide to learn more.

Build attachments your way

Along with our default components, we’ve also made it possible to build attachments using new primitive components. For example, below we’re showing a completely custom Comments setup with attachments.

Our two new components, Composer.AttachFiles, which opens a file upload dialog and Composer.AttachmentsDropArea, which allows you to drop files into the composer, both help enable this,.

function MyComposer() {  const createThread = useCreateThread();
  return (    <Composer.Form      onComposerSubmit={({ body, attachments }) => {        const thread = createThread({          body,          attachments,          metadata: {},        });      }}    >      <Composer.Editor components={/* ... */} />      <Composer.AttachFiles>Attach Files</Composer.AttachFiles>      <Composer.AttachmentsDropArea />      <Composer.Submit>Submit</Composer.Submit>    </Composer.Form>  );}

To render each attached file in the composer, useComposer provides you with information to render. For example, here’s how to list each attachment in a composer.

function MyComposerAttachments() {  const { attachments, removeAttachment } = useComposer();
  return (    <>      {attachments.map((attachment) => (        <div key={attachment.id}>          {attachment.name} ({attachment.status})          <button onClick={() => removeAttachment(attachment.id)}>Remove</button>        </div>      )}    </>  );}

Learn more about handling attachments in our docs, or try our Next.js Comments Primitives example to test and modify a live demo.

Attachments in the dashboard

In addition to our packages, we’ve also added attachments to our dashboard, meaning you can inspect which files your users are uploading.

Get started with attachments

To use the latest features, update now by following our upgrade guide.

Contributors

Contributors include:

6 authors