Make outgoing/incoming a message property or at least make it documented

[romanr]

Took me many hours if not days to figure out why all my outgoing bubble messages appeared on the left side of screen as if they were incoming:

Finally I discovered that you need to set controller's self.sender to same value as you have in message sender! Then the message will appear as outgoing properly.

the code is in JSQMessagesViewController.m:

- (UICollectionViewCell *)collectionView:(JSQMessagesCollectionView *)collectionView cellForItemAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
    ///////......

    BOOL isOutgoingMessage = [messageSender isEqualToString:self.sender];

1. It is not clearly documented and only implied that you will assign sender to same value as message sender
2. there is no API to set the incoming/outgoing direction implicitly
3. and on top of that, it is generally a bad style to make above distinction by comparing NSStrings

I think the best way would be is to add parameter to JSQMessage constructor like this:

JSQMessage *m = [[JSQMessage alloc] initWithText:messageText 
sender:sender date:messageDate 
direction:jsqDirectionOutgoing];

[jessesquires]

Thanks @romanr - This is already in the works, see #389.

Regarding the design:

The implicit distinction/comparison is actually much cleaner and nicer than having to track/set a separate BOOL value, which was a major shortcoming of v4.0 of this library. With the current design, the view is constructed directly from the model data -- not some arbitrary flag. If you compare the old v4.0 to the current build, you'll see how this is a more modular, flexible, and cleaner design.

However, as you noted - docs need to be better! #389 will be implemented soon! 👍

Closing this issue as a duplicate.