Unread counts per stream/user?

Question

Ive gone through your docs and searched and have not found an answer to this. Wondering if you have a way to get how many items in a given stream have not been read by a given user?

Answer 1

The is_seen and is_read flags on activities are not set per user (see the notification feed docs). Once an activity has been marked as read/seen, it will be marked as read/seen on subsequent retrievals, regardless of user. In that sense, there is no mechanism to retrieve how many items in a given stream/feed have not been read by a specific user.

However, a common use case is to create separate notification feeds per user, e.g. notification:billy and notification:jimmy and use targeting with your activities to get them on both feeds:

{
    "actor": "shelly",
    "verb": "like",
    "object": "state:idaho",
    "to": ["notification:billy", "notification:jimmy"]
}

In this way you could check how many items have not been read by billy via the unread field in the retrieval call for the notification:billy feed.