I am building a mobile app (in flutter firebase, but the answer does not have to be firebase specific). And I would like to implement a feature that notifies users whenever anyone from their contact list joins the app. This seems like a very EXPENSIVE feature.
At the top of my head, I see a lambda/cloud function that is triggered everytime a user joins and then searches a database of users and their respective contacts for the existence of the new user's phone number. To me, this solution does not scale well for two reasons: if the number of total users is in the millions and the number of users joining simultaneously is a lot.
My better solution is to get the user's contacts upon joining and then searching a database of current users contacts for any of the phone numbers of the newly joined user.
Is there a solution better than the second one? If so, what is it? If the second solution is standard, what kind of backend storage mechanism provides the best search and retrieval time for a database of users and their respective contacts?
In the case of large users ill not do first solution because that may slow the sign up process instead i will creat a cron job that runs at a specific time or periodically it will get the list of the latest users signed up that day or that hour whatever you prefer then that cron will check the new user if related to any user in the databases and send a notification right away, or a better solution create a temporary table in a database in another server insert the notification informations into the other server, creat another cron job in the second server it will run at a specific time to sendthe notification
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I am very new to coding. but i managed to build a group chat app using a low code platform called flutterflow. i managed to spend significant amount of time on it and was able to build a public group chat app except few functionalities. I am hoping to find help from here. for the following questions.
I have chat mods appointed on a group level. like if you create a group, you are a founder and you can assign mods to that perticular group chat. now i want these mods to be able to ban a user in that particular group chat.
I have tried created a subcollection in groups called "banned user" and created two feilds. one is "banned users" document reference to users. and another is "banned_till" to record a time stamp until the user gets banned.
Problem with this is when i ban a user twice, it creates two documents in the user reference with the same user. and two documents has different "banned_till" times. which one it is supposed to pick?
i tried to do this and put a conditional visibility to the chat that "if current time is less than or equal to banned_till time" it wont let user type in the textfield to chat. but this is giving me gray screen.
I am very new to this. any help would be appreciated.
there is specific way to do so. you have to set custom logic. like save all banned users in a firebase database object with thier max time and procced next.
I am making a chess app which has a Firebase backend, i am using cloud firestore and cloud functions. basically i am using node 8 to avoid billing issues on cloud functions, i can call and trigger, but i can't wrap my head about how to make an action happen on another device instead of on my own.
After authenticating and logging in, the user gets into a lobby which is a tableViewController and there are shown only the users that are currently logged in.
What i want to achieve is by tapping on a certain row the user that got the tap on it gets an alert shown for him which states whether he accepts the challenge or he declines it. Based on that i proceed to the game or do something else.
The question is though how to make this alert trigger on the other user's device?
Also i've seen some posts that it can be done with snapshotListener on a document, but again i run into the problem of understanding how to trigger the alert on another device. If you've got some other good ideas please share!
Thank you for any feedback!
I think snapshot listeners are really the only way to go. You could use other Firebase services but those aren’t the right tools for the job. Consider creating a collection, maybe call it requests:
[requests]
<userId-userId> (recipientUserId-initiatorUserId)
initiator: string
recipient: string
date: date
Each user has a snapshot listener that listens to this collection where their own userId is equal to recipient. You can add a date field to sort the list by most recent, for example. When a user wants to challenge another user, all they need to do is create a document in this collection:
<userId-userId> (recipientUserId-initiatorUserId)
initiator: myUserId
recipient: theirUserId
date: now
And the recipient's client will instantly see this document.
You could include dressing data in this document, like the initiator's display name or a path to their avatar. But this data may be stale by the time it's rendered so the alternative is to fetch the dressing data from the database using the userId. You could also auto-gen the document ID but if you configure it (like this), it can make operations like deleting simpler. You could also configure the userIds to be alphanumerical so only one request can exist between two users; but if they requested each other at the same time, one would overwrite the other and you'd have to handle that potential edge case. There are lots of things to consider but this is the starting point.
In Access there is a feature called "Create email" whereby you can select a table and send rows to users to fill in data.
When they reply to the email, Access automatically updates with the data they have entered.
Thats great if each user only has one or two rows of data to fill in, but if they need to fill in a large quantity of data, they might only get round to filling in a few records at a time, and potentially not in the same order as is in the database.
How can users keep track of what they have updated and what they havn't?
Does this functionality exist or is this something that Access can't handle?
Many thanks
John
Hardly anything can handle this, because you have no control of what the user may do with your e-mail. Further, you often have to rely on one e-mail client only like Outlook which never will be true in real life where people read mail on all sort of devices.
The best option is to forward a link to a site where the user can input data and where you have full validation of these, and where the collected data are ready for import in your database in a controlled manner.
I'm creating an app for Q&A that unifies twitter mentions/DMs, facebook wall posts/messages, as well as email and sms into one inbox. I know how I'm going to handle the SMS (storing each incoming message and outgoing response), but I'm wondering if it's realistic to apply the same methodology to twitter/facebook messages.
I figure I need to store them so I can at least mark them read/unread. Is this how TweetDeck does it? I can't imagine them polling the API constantly without caching anything.
By the way if you know of an app that does this already that would be fantastic. Hootsuite does everything but SMS and email oddly.
Assuming you're building a mobile app (since you mention SMS), if you're aiming to support arbitrary Facebook & Twitter accounts (ie including very busy ones) & use over a long period of time, then you can't store all the tweets & posts on the mobile device: this storage required would grow over time to exceed the capacity of any device.
You can store a reasonable number of "recent" tweets/posts in full; these form the backing model for your UI's views. When the user navigates past either end you can retrieve more via the APIs, and you'll perform housekeeping on this collection so it doesn't get too big, discarding older ones as necessary.
(This collection may end up being gappy: eg if I haven't run the app for a week, when I start it it would retrieve the most recent day's content, leaving a gap between yesterday's content & that of a week ago. Twitter's apps do this & show the gaps, allowing the user to fill them in via the APIs.)
If you need to keep track of read/unread status, you could store this & the unique id for a larger number of items; but again, you'll eventually need to purge these too.
You might want to look at the Twitter User Streams feature; Facebook's Realtime Updates isn't as well-suited for mobile apps (unless backed by your own server).
I am using the GA Data Export API to interact with Google Analytics and I'm making a lot of progress, I am using this URL Endpoint initially to pull all the profiles under an account:
https://www.google.com/analytics/feeds/accounts/default
This URL retrieves each GA ID (profile) and each UA. One thing I've realized is one account can contain multiple UAs and when this happens, this request pulls all profiles. We have a client who has about 115 profiles under like 10 different UAs, and the request takes about 30 seconds for the initial request (and then I believe it must be cached, because it speeds up considerably after this, but then the next day the same thing occurs).
Is there a way to get a list of UA's without pulling the profiles? This way I can query the UA specifically for the profiles instead of pulling each one.
Any advice on this would be really helpful!
Thanks
UPDATE: Here's some documentation on the specific call I am using right now:
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataReferenceAccountFeed.html
UPDATE 1: I have found some interesting information in the docs
Once your application has verified
that the user has Analytics access,
its next step is to find out which
Analytics accounts the user has access
to. Remember, users can have access to
many different accounts, and within
them, many different profiles. For
this reason, your application cannot
access any report information without
first requesting the list of accounts
available to the user. The resulting
accounts feed returns that list, but
most importantly, the list also
contains the account profiles that the
user can view.
So this means that you have to use the default accounts call to get these back? Surely, somebody has had this issue before?
So apparently, you can query the account if you know the UA-ID, however there is no way to get back a list of only UA IDs.
One way you can do it is have the user enter their own UA ID instead of having them choose one; not as user-friendly as it could be but better than making the user wait 30 seconds!