How to know if a message is seen or not

Question

We are displaying list of messages on user message feed. Messages are stored in a feed collection, where its organized by users. We want want track if user has seen the message or not

feed/{user_id}/
              {message_id1: {seen:0,score:0.2}}
              {message_id2: {seen:0,score:0.2}}
              {message_id3: {seen:1,score:0.2}}

At present we are thinking to update "seen" boolean for a given message if user has seen it. Are there more efficient ways to do this in firebase (e.g. firebase native analytics). Not sure if doing so many writes back efficient

Frank van Puffelen · Answer 1 · 2023-07-17T13:49:37.227

1

There are two common ways to track what messages a user has seen:

Keep a flag for each message that the user has seen.
Keep the timestamp/key of the most recent message that the user has seen.

The latter is a lot easier to implement, but relies in the fact users typically read message in order: scrolling from their oldest unread message to the newest message. If that is not the case for you, there's not really a better option than tracking the status for each message (and in a multi-user chat room, for each user too).

Also see:

How to structure NoSQL messages to get unreads by 1 query? (long explanation with examples of the same use-case, but then for Firebase's Realtime Database)

edited Jul 17 '23 at 13:49

answered Apr 06 '20 at 01:50

Frank van Puffelen

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Thank you! Does firebase have anything to help track this? – brooding_goat Apr 06 '20 at 02:12
It's a database. It has no knowledge of any use-case, but you can build almost any use-case on top of it. – Frank van Puffelen Apr 06 '20 at 02:36
I meant with firebase analytics on the client / device. – brooding_goat Apr 06 '20 at 02:54
You can log events about the number of messages a user sees/has seen to Analytics. But you can't reasonably act on those events in the app of an individual again, unless you want to target groups of users by the number of unread messages or somethig like that. – Frank van Puffelen Apr 06 '20 at 03:01

How to know if a message is seen or not

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