Feat(front): separate author and avatar; Add easy backend function

[lamylio]

Motivation: #2501

Currently, the message avatar is either displayed from the author name or the miscellaneous and undocumented metadata.avatarName and requires the user to know he needs to .send() the message for it to have an effect.

Also, if metadata.avatarName is set, then the frontend ToolTip falsely displays the avatarName instead of the author.

This PR aims to :

Backend:

Add new set_author_and_avatarmethod to the message API, allowing dynamic updates to both the author and avatar, demystifying the process.

Frontend:

Refactor the avatar display logic to separate author and avatar handling, with a fallback to the author's name if the avatar is not defined (as this is currently the case).

[hayescode]

@lamylio send() send the message to the UI, update() updates the message in the UI, stream_token() send a chunk of text to the message content, and remove() removes the message from the UI. This seems like one of the least mystifying parts of this project.

I'm assuming you're doing something like this:

msg = cl.Message(author="GPT")
await msg.stream_token(chunk)

But your issue here and in #2501 can be solved like this:

msg = await cl.Message(author="GPT").send()
await msg.stream_token(chunk)

Maybe the docs just need to be updated to make this clearer? If not please share your use case and code.

[hayescode]

I updated the documentation to fix the example here.

Chainlit/docs#263

@asvishnyakov @sandangel review/merge?

[lamylio]

Hey, thanks for the reply. Yeah I know and I agree with you, actually never had the issue in my case.
However this PR addresses another issues:

1. The fact that the author's name and the avatar are linked
2. The not-easy-to-know "avatarName" metadata

and by "coincidence" (😉) could "solve" the #2501 issue, by offering another possibility :

msg = await cl.Message()
await msg.set_author_and_avatar(author="GPT")

I admit the set_author_and_avatar could be dropped, but I'd like the have the frontend modification. @hayescode

[hayescode]

@lamylio I'd be ok with the frontend modification only, although I don't see how this will change any behavior or what the benefit is outside of making it clearer what's happening. Can you share why you want this?

[lamylio]

@lamylio I'd be ok with the frontend modification only, although I don't see how this will change any behavior or what the benefit is outside of making it clearer what's happening. Can you share why you want this?

Currently doing this :

await Message(
    content="Hello :)",
    author="Personal Assistant",
    metadata={"avatarName": "robot"},
).send()

Results in this :

While with this PR it shows :

Which is a useful use case, and better match the behavior it should have, imo.

[hayescode]

@lamylio gotcha. Yes please remove the other changes and also please make a PR in https://github.com/Chainlit/docs with this great example code. Thanks!

[github-actions]

This PR is stale because it has been open for 14 days with no activity.