Enable direct messaging with mentors from mentor cards by fetching user IDs and auto-starting conversations

[codeunia-dev]

📌 Overview

This PR introduces seamless direct messaging for mentors, allowing users to initiate a conversation directly from any Mentor Card. The system now automatically fetches mentor user IDs, validates existing conversations, and creates a new one when needed.

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🔧 Key Changes

1. Mentor API Enhancements (app/api/mentors/route.ts)

• Added logic to fetch associated user_id for each mentor.
• Improved response shape for front-end messaging workflows.
• Cleaned duplicated transforms and standardized naming.

2. MentorCard Integration (MentorCard.tsx)

• Added “Message Mentor” CTA with loading/disabled states.

• On click:

  • Fetch mentor’s user_id
  • Identify existing conversation OR create a new one
  • Redirect user to the chat thread

• Improved UI/UX and error handling for messaging flows.

3. Conversation Service Updates (conversationService.ts)

• Added helper to create a conversation if none exists.
• Standardized request payloads and conversation lookup logic.
• Removed unused params and improved type safety.

4. Types Update (types/messaging.ts)

• Added/updated interfaces for messaging entities.
• Ensured compatibility with new API response structure.

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🎯 Benefits

• Users can now message mentors instantly—without navigating to the chat dashboard first.
• Cleaner, more maintainable messaging service logic.
• Foundation for future features such as mentor-student chat history, online status, etc.

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Authored by: @akshay0611

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Project	Deployment	Preview	Comments	Updated (UTC)
codeunia	Ready	Preview	Comment	Nov 28, 2025 10:17am