My situation is the following:
I'm using the stream-js library. I add entries to the notification feeds of users for certain events - comments, follows, etc. After I write to their feed I also send a push notification to that user's device.
If a user clicks on a push notification I want to be able to mark the corresponding activity as seen. There's currently no way to do that since the add or addToMany calls do not return the ids of the added activities for me to send in the notification payload.
Ideally I'd want a way to mark a notification feed item as seen either by an activity group id or by some other unique id (or the foreignId). Is there a way to do that? If not, what is the alternative?
Two parts to this answer:
Getting the ID of an activity that you just added
The addActivity call in the various Stream client libraries (I'm using stream-js in this case) will return back the created activity, which should include the activity ID. Response looks something like this:
{
actor: 'ken',
duration: '9.65ms',
foreign_id: '',
id: '8b5d69a9-8b73-11e8-98ab-12cb9e7b86a4',
object: 'some-object',
origin: null,
target: '',
time: '2018-07-19T16:48:21.045496',
verb: 'add-activity'
}
Marking notification feed items as seen or read
The way to mark a notification feed item as seen or read is a little funky - first, you get the feed, like you would normally do, but you'll also pass in the mark_seen or mark_read options. (true will mark all items as seen or read, and an array of activity group IDs will mark only those items.)
From that call, the notification feed will be returned without the items marked as seen or read - but the next call to retrieve the notification feed will have the items marked accordingly.
More docs on that here: https://getstream.io/docs/flat_feeds/#notification_feeds
activity ID --> activity group ID
You might have noticed that you get the activity ID when adding the activity, but you need to pass in the activity group ID when marking items seen or read.
All notification feeds are actually aggregated feeds as well - by default, the aggregation format that they use is just the activity ID, which means that there will be only one activity per activity group, and the activity group ID will be the same as the activity ID. So, you can just use the activity ID returned by the addActivity call to get the notification feed and mark that activity group as seen or read.
If you're not using the default aggregation format (e.g., the activity group ID is not the same as the activity ID), then you'll likely have to retrieve the notification feed and grab the necessary activity group ID from there.
Related
Let's say I want to build a system where each user has access to a notification feed and an aggregated feed, with the following groups:
user as flat feed
hashtag as flat feed
notification as notification feed
timeline as aggregated feed
We also have the following relations:
user:b follows hashtag:a
user:b follows user:a
Now consider the following situation:
If user A posts with hashtag A, I would like user B to get an activity in its notification feed (thanks to relation 1). But I also would also like all followers of user A to see in their timeline that user A did something. Then, user B will get the activity in its notification feed, and in its timeline (because of relation 2): there is a duplicate.
Is there a way to avoid this situation ?
A naive way would be to manually filter the feed and prune the aggregated activities we do not want to see. But this of course seems non optimal.
Thank you very much!
You can use discard rules to avoid activities matching one of rule from getting added to a follower's feed.
This is usually something you use to avoid own activities from showing up in your notification feed.
Here's the link to the docs on Discard Rules:
https://getstream.io/docs/#discard-rules
I have an aggregated feed ID in the format 46702136-5b7a-11e9-8080-80007f00215c.verb:id_2019-04-10.
When I call client.getActivities with this ID, I get an error "Invalid activity ID". I've tried just using the first part of the ID but this fails to return anything.
Is there a reason this doesn't work, or an alternative?
The get activities endpoint allows you to retrieve individual activities, not aggregated activities.
This is because aggregated activities are specific to individual feeds and their feed group.
If you want to fetch an activity inside a group, you can still use client.getActivities eg.
client.getActivities(group.activities[0].id)
Otherwise if you want to fetch a single aggregated activity from a specific feed; you can do something like this:
feed.get(
id_lte=group.id,
id_gte=group.id,
limit=1
)
Our system is set up for users to create and assign tasks to themselves and others. Each user has a notification feed that follows feeds of tasks which they are assigned or involved with.
When we delete tasks we also want the task feed and all activities to be deleted. We are deleting feeds like so:
$client = new GetStream\Stream\Client($client, $secret);
$taskFeed = $client->feed("task", 1234);
$taskFeed->delete();
However, when I look at the data explorer I still see activities related to the task in the notification feeds.
Unfollowing everyone from the task feed doesn't seem possible; the docs seem to suggest a limit of retrieving 500 followers.
What's the proper way to handle this? Do I need to remove every activity individually using the foreign_ids?
Deleting a feed won't remove the activities that were previously added to it. They may have been replicated into other feeds via following relationships or targeting via the 'to' field.
You're correct that removing activities by foreign_id is the way to go.
I'm building an activity feed application, where a user can like/comments on each activity feed. I went through GetStream.io documentation and looks like I'll have to send the activity with object ids.
{
id:"ef696c12-69ab-11e4-8080-80003644b625",
actor:"User:1",
object:"Comment:12",
started_at:"2014-11-11T15:06:16+01:00",
target:"Feed:100",
time:"2014-11-11T14:06:30.494",
verb:"add"
}
User:1 and Feed:12 are the objects in my application database? Does it mean that, while retrieving activities, I'll have to hit my database to retrieve the complete feeds?
Say the Feed:12 had few likes and comments earlier from other users. How do I get the complete set of likes/comments on user timeline feed?
What if I want to customize the view, say I want to show all users (image, name, the profile like etc) along with comment with timestamp similar to FB? Do I need to send these attributes as additional parameters for each feed?
Thanks,
Yes, when you fetch a feed from Stream and we give you back these references like user:1 or comment:12, we expect that you'd "enrich" those details from your database.
Typically what our users do is track the name of the model (eg, user) and the user_id (eg, 1). When you get the feed and put it into a hash map, you'll iterate over the activities, pull out all of the actor attributes, and do a single lookup like select * from user where id in (1,3,5,6,9,12) so that you're only hitting your database one time for all user objects or all comment objects or whatever. Then, replace those activities in your hash map so now you'd have actor: <object for User 9> and any other attributes you'd need for your UI presentment.
Then do the same for other references you pass in the activity, and so on.
Things we DON'T recommend are putting in string references for things that could change on your side. For example, if you had actor: "user:ian" instead of my user_id, if I ever change my username later then things probably wouldn't work properly on your side.
I am curious to find out how you guys are incorporating meta data about command/event messages in a cqrs solution. For example, I want to know who, when, which host, etc. generated the command. I don't want to put these into message itself.
Say in a web app, user created a shopping cart CreateShoppingCart { CartID, UserID }. Then added items to it, AddItem { CartID, ItemID, Amount, etc }. I want to record exacty when the used clicked the "Add To Cart" button.
I can add this into some Dictionary<string, object> Headers { get;
set; } property. That property could be in a BaseMessage class.
I can rely on the messaging framework (something like NServiceBus) and add this data into the message header in the message context.
Send seperate command for this info. Something like LogCommandDetails { CommandID: 'id of AddItem command', DateTime, Some other meta data }. When this comamnd is handled, I can update the projection of ItemAdded event and add this data into the projection.
What are your thoughts?
Thanks
Typically this information is stored in message headers, which is option 2. This is exactly what message headers are for. Note, there is a subtle difference between a message from perspective of a messaging framework and a message in your domain which is the body of the message in a messaging framework.
However, it can be difficult to discern what is data and what is metadata. I run into this issue with dates, among other things. For example, is a timestamp associated with an event metadata or proper domain data? What if the timestamp is required for execution of certain business logic? In your example, do you need to record the date for reporting or audit purposes, or is the date needed for the domain to function? In the former case, use headers, in the latter, place the date in the message body.