Subscribing to realtime changes for a notification feed

[benmgreene]

I have a notification feed that I'm attempting to subscribe to so that I can alter the unseen notifications count. Getting the count on the initial call works fine, but the callback passed to subscribe is not being called.

Meteor.call('userNotificationsFeedToken', function(err, token) {
  var notification_feed;
  if (err) {
    return console.error(err);
  } else {
    notification_feed = Stream.feedManager.getFeed('user_notifications', User.current()._id, token);
    notification_feed.get({
      limit: 1
    }).then(function(data) {
      return unseen_notifications_count.set(data.unseen);
    });
    return notification_feed.subscribe(function(data) {
      return unseen_notifications_count.set(data.unseen);
    });
  }
});

Thanks for your help.

[matthisk]

Why not just subscribe to the publication i.e.:

var subscription = Meteor.subscribe('Stream.feeds.notification');

if (subscription.ready()) {
    var enriched = Stream.feeds.notification.find().fetch();
}

This will also give you live updates on the notification feeds, without worrying about generating tokens for client side. Because you are using a non-standard feed group name you would have to configure this feed group in your settings.json:

{
    // ....
    notificationFeed: 'user_notification'
}

This is the default configuration: https://github.com/GetStream/stream-node/blob/master/src/config.default.js

[benmgreene]

I am actually using that approach elsewhere (and it works very well), but for this I'm just trying to get a count of the unseen and unread notifications. What is your recommended way of doing that in Meteor?

Thanks much.

[matthisk]

I get it. Yes that use case isn't covered by the current publication made by this integration library, it is actually a good idea to add it (since we are already listening for realtime changes on the server with this meteor library). Otherwise the code you provided above should work. I will have to investigate why this code is not working. If you want feel free to create a PR to add the functionality to track unread notifications via integration library. Otherwise I will have to see when I can find time to add this.

[matthisk]

@benmgreene do you have realtime notification enabled on this notification feed (you can check this in the feed group configuration on the getstream.io dashboard).

[benmgreene]

Yep.

So I've been doing some digging. Some actions do trigger the callback, and others don't. I haven't finished testing, but so far I've noticed that:

• Stream.feedManager.getFeed('...', user_id).get(mark_seen: true) does NOT trigger the callback
• Stream.feedManager.getFeed('...', user_id).get(mark_read: [a_id]) DOES trigger the callback

Working on some more tests, will update.

[benmgreene]

Another:

• Stream.feedManager.getFeed('...', id).addActivity( activity ) DOES trigger the callback

[matthisk]

You only get Faye updates for unread and unseen when you supply a list of id's to mark. When you supply a boolean to either one of these it will not trigger a realtime update.

[benmgreene]

Ok -- what's the reasoning for that?

[benmgreene]

Thanks for the new getNotificationFeedStats method! It's working pretty well. I did find a bug (which I have fixed) -- see #6