🏷️ File caption

[jakobroehrl]

Wouldn't it be nice if we had the possibility to add a caption to the file upload?
This time the user posts the file share in the first message and sometimes a second message with a description.

---

• API API "File caption" #10413
• Frontend Frontend "File caption" #10414
• Android Support "File caption" talk-android#3290
• iOS Support "File caption" talk-ios#1346

[nickvergessen]

So the big issue is that we share the file via the sharing api and we don't have a way there to post a related message.
We might be able to use the share note or something, but that is limited to 1k chars, does not support mentions or anything and so on. So not too sure about it yet.

[nickvergessen]

An idea that crossed my mind yesterday:
In the meantime we have the talkMetaData parameter on shares, e.g. to make clear that a shared file is a voice message.
Maybe we could do that too with the "caption"?

[Antreesy]

Proposal for message and upload modal appearance (see screenshots and mockups below):

Message appearance in chat	Upload files modal appearance

[nickvergessen]

As per discussion the plan is the following:

1. We add a defined magic parameter to the share endpoint that will make talk not create the share system message
2. A dedicated other endpoint will then be added where the text message + share id(s) is sent to and that will create the caption-message and serve the attachment(s) in the message parameter list, so that clients themselves can decide how to render them.

Another problem might be if we allow multiple items, and not each of them has a system message, the shared item tabs does not have an entry for each of them.
We might need to extend the database + API of shared items, to be able to create multiple entries for the same message id.

(that will also be helpful in the future when implementing shared items sections for URLs as there can also be more than 1 per message.