Chat message colours

[Aanson]

Hey all, Happy Christmas!

Just a quick question...

Does anyone know of a simple way to obtain the colour of the most recently shown text in the ChatFrames?

I have a function in my addon which makes a frame 'pulse' when a new message is received, kinda like:

ChatButton.Pulse = function(self)
  self.fadeStep = ( (self.pulseIntensity * 2) / (self.pulseDuration * GetFramerate()) );
  self.isFading = nil;
  self.pulseTexture:SetTexture(1, 1, 1); -- [color="Red"]to match chatType colour[/color]
  return ( self.pulseIsEnabled and (not self.alpha) ) and self:SetScript("OnUpdate", self.OnUpdate);
end

This doesn't really relate to the question I guess, but the onupdate code is:

ChatButton.OnUpdate = function(self)
  self.alpha = self.isFading and ( (self.alpha or 0) - self.fadeStep ) or ( (self.alpha or 0) + self.fadeStep );
  if ( (self.alpha >= 0) and (self.alpha <= self.pulseIntensity) ) then
    return self.pulseTexture:SetAlpha(self.alpha);
  elseif self.isFading then
    self.alpha, self.fadeStep, self.isFading = nil, nil, nil;
    return self:SetScript("OnUpdate", nil);
  end
  self.alpha, self.isFading = self.pulseIntensity, true;
end

Thanks in advance for any possible guidance

Aanson

[ravagernl]

It depends on what messages you want to listen to. If you don't care about what is added, just do a hook on ChatFrame:AddMessage.

[Phanx]

If you need to know the actual message type (rather than just what color the message was printed in) you will need to either (a) use chat filters or (b) hook ChatFrame_MessageEventHandler. Both suffer from the same problem, in that both will get you every single chat message, whether or not it's set to show in a specific frame, or any frame, so you'll have to figure that out yourself.

local eventToCategory = {}

local function SaveLastMessageType(frame, event, ...)
	local category = eventToCategory[event]
	-- This maps eg. "CHAT_MSG_PARTY_LEADER" to "PARTY"
	-- which you can look up in ChatTypeInfo etc.
	
	-- Insert code here to figure out whether this frame
	-- should display this category, and return out if not.
	
	frame.lastMessageType = category
	-- Now you can reference this value in your other scripts.
end

for category, events in pairs(CHAT_CATEGORY_LIST) do
	for i = 1, #events do
		local event = "CHAT_MSG_" .. events[i]
		eventToCategory[event] = category
		ChatFrame_RegisterMessageEventFilter(event, SaveLastMessageType)
	end
end

[Aanson]

Thanks very much. The event filtering function is just what I'm after.

[Aanson]

Out of interest, see if I was just looking for the colour used for the last message, is there a simple way of going about that?

[Phanx]

Do what ravagernl suggested several posts up:

local lastR, lastG, lastB
hooksecurefunc(ChatFrame1, "AddMessage", function(self, message, r, g, b, ...)
     lastR, lastG, lastB = r or 1, g or 1, b or 1
end)

[Aanson]

That's great to know, thanks.

I need to know the message type (ChatTypeInfo) and the Chat Frame it was posted to.

I can hook the AddMessage function of each ChatFrame to establish the latter.

Cheers

[Phanx]

If you need that, just use a filter function, as in the code I'd posted previously; you can get the color from ChatTypeInfo, as detailed in the comments in that code. You do not need to hook multiple functions and deal with tracking messages between them.