Notification system not displaying correct values

Hi,

I am creating a notification system within my app which displays notifications in a drop down, similar to what you would see in Facebook.

In my database, I have set up an entity type ‘Notification’ which has a ‘read?: Yes/ No’ value.
Under each user, they can have a list of notifications.

I am having trouble changing the ‘read: Yes/No’ value on the list of notifications associated to each user.

My work flow is set up per below, however when I trigger this workflow, the notification in the database doesn’t change the ‘Read?’ value to ‘yes’.

Furthermore, I have an icon displaying the number of ‘unread=No notifications’ and even when I manually update the list of notifications to ‘Read?=yes’ it still displays the same number of notifications regardless of the yes/no value in my database.

Screenshot 2020-10-05 at 13.59.49

Does anyone have any suggestions as to where I am going wrong?

Thanks in advance.

Hey Rachel :wave:

There are a bunch of different ways to do this type of thing.

Just one way I am thinking about is to have a list of users attached to the notification, if the user views the notification, then add the user to the ‘usersWhoViewed’ list.

Or another option: once the user views a notification, then add it to the user’s ‘notificationViewed’ list.

If you do a ‘yes/no’ field attached to a notification, depending on how you have your database, it might be turning it ‘yes/no’ for all users.

Does that make sense?

Hope that helps! :blush:

@j805 www.NoCodeMinute.com

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Hiya Jason,

Thanks, yes I had considered a few different ways of setting this up, one other option as you suggested changing to to a different type i.e. user notification ‘viewed’ list. However, my understanding is that this is how a boolean in Bubble should work or perhaps I am missing something?

I don’t want to add anything additional to my database if it’s unnecessary. There are only two users as an attribute to the type ‘notification’ which is a creator and the recipient.

Thx,
Rachel

Update:

Somehow the workflow to change the notification ‘Read? Yes/No’ to ‘Yes’ has just started working …

Still having an issue with the counter displaying all notifications instead of just the number of with the value ‘read?=No’ .

Not sure, but my guess is it has something to do with the expression having to do multiple searches… current user, their list of notifications, and then the yes/no field which is a different datatype than the user.

Try using a “:filter” to narrow the list of notifications to yes/no, and then put the :count at the end of that.

So… “Current User’s List of unread Notifications:filtered:count”

And within the :filtered search box, you put Read? = “yes”

Thanks @ed727 , that worked perfectly!

Great! I think the issue is that you are effectively doing a search based on yes/no, and that search needed to either be in the search panel, or via a filter search, rather than just sitting within an expression.

Separately, when looking at your data structure (having a list of notifications within the user field), this discussion came to mind: Alternative approach to the Bubble’s recent tutorials for list of things You may have already seen it, but it gets into pros/cons of having longer lists within a datatype.

Thanks again, I hadn’t seen that thread but glad you pinned it as Im trying to ensure I build my database the right way from the beginning so that’s essential reading.

Really appreciate your help here.