Notify users about new content

As for the sms idea I’ve looked it up for my place and the most known carriers (ex. vodaphone greece and cosmote) don’t have email to sms forwarding option…

I managed to replicate most of my screens as detail screens, but in the case of my employee directory I am missing some functionality that apparently is not possible with detail screens. I had an in-app filter to filter colleagues by projects, and another filter for favorites, so that you could mark the ones that you’re often in contact with and access them in the all vs. favorites’ tab. I wasn’t able to replicate the chat feature in a detail screen. Can I implement any of this on a detail screen e.g. the favorites part?

For the favorites part, create a user-specific column in the table you build that tab. Use a choice component writing to that column and conditionally show inline lists filtered by the “Is Favorited” column.

For filters, if you have a fixed list of choices then you can create a new table for it, add a user-specific boolean column and an If Then Else column (if boolean is true then return the name of the project, else empty). Then on your screen, add a floating button that links to the table, display it as a checklist.

Going back to the actual list you want to filter, create a joined text column that points to the If Then Else column stated in paragraph 2. Add a final visibility if then else in the same table:

  • If joined text is empty then true.
  • if joined text includes project then true.
  • Else false.

If you have a growing list of projects you can also use the way above, just do it in your Projects table. If there are duplicated projects please tell us so we can guide you through the way to filter out duplicated ones.

2 Likes

I wish I’d understand your instructions…too complicated for a newbie like me. :see_no_evil:

I’ll get back to this later. At least I made some progress on the counter part. :muscle:
I created a column that counts all approved news entries and displays the correct number in the tab icon (I added the counter code to all of my tabs except for the chat screen, which I haven’t been able to transform into a detail screen).

Now I have two new problems:

  1. How can I make the counter only count recently approved and published entries and not all the approved entries? On the frontend, though, I want to display a list of all the news, not just the recent ones.

2, How do I create a user time stamp to know when the user was last logged in and compare it with the time the news was published to update the counter accordingly?

Now I understand what you meant when you said “do it on every screen”. really tedious!

1 Like

Now I have a list of the number new contents (unread) as indicator since the User’s last visit. One example for my use case is the list of new jobs added. These jobs are shown as inline list. How can I change the background of the inline list? For example, if the list is not yet read, have the background darker and once User have clicked on it, then background turns to system default.
Help on CSS will be much appreciated.
Thanks.

As an alternative to fiddling with CSS, you could consider something like this:

3 Likes

Also looks good. How would I do this?

Just use an if-then-else column for the image.
If the user hasn’t viewed/read the item, return the image. Else blank.
Then use that column as the image source in the inline list.

2 Likes

Understand this. I just realise I am already using company logo as image. I think the next best visual impact would be change text color? need CSS again?

hehe, yes

Another alternative would be to split your content into two separate lists, with any new content in the first list and everything else in the second.

And yet another alternative would be a single list, but grouped by “read/viewed status”

2 Likes

Grouping would do the job…
You are not recommended CSS for background change due to complexity or list may break under some circumstances?

No, not really. I have nothing against CSS and I use lots of it.
But I like to explore alternatives - there is almost always more than one way to get anything done :slight_smile:

2 Likes

thanks. in this use case i think best is background change, but I do not have this experience. Suggestions much appreciated

This is where I pass to the ball to one of my friends, @ThinhDinh or @Manu.n
I said I used a lot of CSS, but that doesn’t mean I’m any good with it :smiley:

3 Likes

I’d also recommend using an IF column and attaching an emoji to the message if it’s unread such as one of the following (:red_circle: :yellow_circle: :green_circle: :eight_spoked_asterisk: :new:). Still does the job, allows you to keep your existing images, and is a heck of lot easier than trying to implement some sort of CSS solution.

With that said, this would probably be a good thread for you to look through.

7 Likes

What would you consider recent? Within a certain amount of minutes, hours, days, weeks? I’m sure you could create a math column that subtracts the item’s posted date from NOW, and if the value is less than your pre-determined maximum value (that you would consider as recent) then you would use an IF column to return ‘true’ to count it as recent or not.

There isn’t a good way to know when a user last logged in. A user could be logged in indefinitely so there would never be a log entry for each time that they open the app. You may have to have an action that’s fired when a user views their notifications so you know when they last viewed them. Or do a rollup of the latest date of the latest notification that was viewed and use that to compare to NOW, and anything with (NOW-date) less than the (NOW-date) of the last read row would be considered as new.

4 Likes

Hey, thanks for your reply. By recent I mean that I’ll be updating news roughly on a weekly basis. Atm my counter is calculating all the news entries ever published, but I only want it to count the ones that were added since the user last checked the news. You mentioned I can use an action to know when the user views the new entries. What kind of action would be suitable? Do I have to add it to the rich text element or to my inline list?

How did you do it? Can you share a screenshot?

I have to re-do as I made a mistake on something and I thought discard changes would be only to the last publish time (2hours on my screen), but system apparently cleared my two days of work.