Do we need to pass in chatContext, or can we instead use the context in MultimediaMessage? Based on my understanding of Context, it eliminates the necessity of passing values in through its props.

Since chatContext holds the information regarding the current height of the input bar, we need to pass in the chatContext here. We also can't call the context inside of MultimediaMessage since it is a class based component and can't use the useContext hook

So I actually found this out last week, but apparently we can get the Context within a Class based component, without needing the useContext hook (https://reactjs.org/docs/context.html#classcontexttype). It would look something like

class MultimediaMessage extends React.PureComponent<Props, State> {
     static contextType = ChatContext;

      // Now we can do something like this.context?.chatInputBarHeights....
}

Whether or not it's better to pass it in as a Prop or access it in the Class directly, probably defer to someone more experienced! For reference, I did this in this diff, https://phab.comm.dev/D5515?vs=18028&id=18032#toc, before I ended up refactoring it out since I no longer needed it.

oh sweet, thanks for sharing that with me! I didn't know that was possible. I am also curious if there are any benefits/tradeoffs to doing it that way...

CC: @ashoat @atul

I think it's definitely better to do as a hook, like @ginsu is doing here