A Simple Hack: Sorting rooms and people

[#1]

This post was originally written by a colleague of mine, @michelgrootjans on our internal Confluence.

Problem

It's inefficient and time consuming to use the People sidebar to find people when there are many of them.

Manual sorting doesn't scale.

Using the 'New Chat' works of course, but why would you need a sidebar then?

I would like my sidebar to be automatically sorted.

Solution

For OSX users, edit HipChat.app/Contents/Resources/chat.html.(tested and works)

For windows users: edit <hipchat_installation_root>/localweb/hipchat-client.js (not tested, please let us know in the comments if this works for you)

I would like to sort conversations based on recency. Feel free to edit this page if you've found how to do this.

I've managed to sort by unread count first, then by alphabetical name. To get this behaviour, add these lines at the beginning of the function orderRooms:

...
}, {
  key: 'orderRooms',
  value: function orderRooms(rooms) {
    // start of hack: sort rooms by [unread, name]
    rooms = _(rooms).chain()
      .sortBy('name').reverse()
      .sortBy('unreadCount').reverse()
      .value()
    // end of hack
    
    if (this.data.room_order.length) {
      var results = _.compact(_.map(this.data.room_order, function (jid) {
...

References

• https://www.sunflowerdojo.com/2016/11/30/ux-case-study-hipchats-people-list/
• https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Hipchat-questions/Sorting-people-list-automatically/qaq-p/48709

Thanks again Michel for letting me share this interesting hack with the rest of the world!

[cognivator]

I solved the same issue a different way, which also let's me change how the names are displayed in the left-nav.

In `_getPeopleList`, replace,

...
name: room.name
...

with,

...
name: room.displayName
...

Add then add the following at the top of `orderRooms`,

 // Hack Begin

   // set some additional name fields
   var roomNames = _.map(rooms, function (room) {

     // name to sort on
     room.sortName = _(room.name).split(', ').reverse().value().join(' ');

     // name to display in left-nav
     room.displayName = room.sortName;

     return room;
   });

   // sort the rooms
   var sortedNames = _.sortBy(roomNames, 'sortName');

   // replace original rooms with sorted rooms
   rooms = sortedNames;

 // Hack End

[Eric Peacock]

Worked for me on Windows 10!

Thank you!!!