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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?

Valentin
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1 Answers1

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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.

Saransh Singh
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Ken Hoff
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    Hi Ken - thanks for this answer. I'm mainly using the `addToMany` call when adding notification activities, though, and I noticed that one doesn't return anything besides how long the call took. I really don't want to switch to using `addActivity` since I am potentially populating many feeds at once so it's impractical. Seems to me the way to go to mark a single activity as seen is: Send unique activity id to server -> fetch the notification feed -> Find matching id -> do another get call to mark that activity as read. seems inefficient but I guess there's no other way? – Valentin Jul 20 '18 at 07:42