@rcb-plugins/markdown-renderer

Markdown Renderer

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Quickstart
• Features
• API Documentation
• Team
• Contributing
• Others

Introduction

Markdown Renderer is a plugin that adds support for rendering markdown in chat bubbles within the React ChatBotify Core Library. By default, the core library does not ship with markdown support. This plugin relies on chatbot events to intercept messages and determine if markdown rendering logic has to be applied. The demo gif above should give you a pretty good idea of what this plugin is capable of doing.

For support, join the plugin community on Discord to connect with other developers and get help.

Quickstart

The plugin is incredibly straightforward to use and is available on npm. Simply follow the steps below:

1. Install the plugin with the following command within your project folder:

   npm install @rcb-plugins/markdown-renderer

2. Import the plugin:

   import MarkdownRenderer from "@rcb-plugins/markdown-renderer";

3. Initialize the plugin within the plugins prop of ChatBot:

   import ChatBot from "react-chatbotify";
   import MarkdownRenderer from "@rcb-plugins/markdown-renderer";
   
   const MyComponent = () => {
     return (
       <ChatBot plugins=[MarkdownRenderer()]/>
     );
   };

4. Add the renderMarkdown attribute to the Block that requires markdown rendering:

   import ChatBot from "react-chatbotify";
   import MarkdownRenderer, { MarkdownRendererBlock } from "@rcb-plugins/markdown-renderer";
   
   const MyComponent = () => {
     const flow = {
       start: {
         message: "### What is your age?",
         renderMarkdown: ["BOT", "USER"]
       } as MarkdownRendererBlock
     }
   
     return (
       <ChatBot plugins=[MarkdownRenderer()]/>
     );
   };

The quickstart above shows how rendering of markdown can be done for both bot and user messages within the start block. The documentation website for the React ChatBotify Core Library also contains a live markdown renderer example that uses this plugin. You may wish to check it out!

Features

Markdown Renderer is a lightweight plugin that provides the following features to your chatbot:

• Render markdown in bot chat messages
• Render markdown in user chat messages
• Optionally pass in your own custom markdown component to render markdown your way

API Documentation

Plugin Configuration

The MarkdownRenderer plugin accepts a configuration object that allows you to customize its behavior and appearance. An example configuration is passed in below to initialize the plugin:

import ChatBot from "react-chatbotify";
import MarkdownRenderer from "@rcb-plugins/markdown-renderer";

const MyComponent = () => {
  const pluginConfig = {
    // defaults to true, auto enable events required for plugin to work
    autoConfig: true,
  }

  return (
    <ChatBot plugins={[MarkdownRenderer(pluginConfig)]}/>
  )
}

As you may be able to tell from above, there are 5 configurable sections within the plugin configuration which are autoConfig, promptBaseColors, promptHoveredColors, textAreaHighlightColors and advancedStyles. These are described in the table below:

Configuration Option	Type	Default Value	Description
autoConfig	boolean	true	Enables automatic configuration of required events for markdown rendering. Recommended to keep as true. If set to false, you need to configure events manually.
markdownComponent	React.ComponentType<{ children: React.ReactNode }>	null	A React component to wrap around the message's content to customize its styling, layout, or behavior. The component will receive the message's content as its children prop, so you can design it to add custom formatting, animations, or other UI enhancements. If not provided, a default wrapper from react-markdown will be used.

Rendering Markdown

To render markdown in messages, add the renderMarkdown attribute to any Block that requires markdown rendering. The renderMarkdown attribute is an array that accepts "USER" and/or "BOT". An example can be seen below:

import ChatBot from "react-chatbotify";
import MarkdownRenderer from "@rcb-plugins/markdown-renderer";

const MyComponent = () => {
  const flow = {
    start: {
      message: "What is your age?",
      renderMarkdown: ["USER", "BOT"],
    },
    // ... other blocks
  };

  return (
    <ChatBot plugins={[MarkdownRenderer(pluginConfig)]}/>
  )
}

As you can see from the example above containing a start block, renderMarkdown contains both "USER" and "BOT", which means it will render markdown messages for both user and bot messages within the start block.

Team

• Tan Jin

Contributing

If you have code to contribute to the project, open a pull request from your fork and describe clearly the changes and what they are intended to do (enhancement, bug fixes etc). Alternatively, you may simply raise bugs or suggestions by opening an issue.

Others

For any questions regarding the project, please reach out for support via discord.