User Specific Columns & Collection-level Actions

[ThinhDinh]

@mimof

• In User profile, a User can select as many ‘Topics’ as they are interested in, from a ‘choice’ list. If it was for movies, for example, they could pick ‘thriller’, ‘drama’, ‘sci-fi’, ‘historic’, ‘comedy’ etc. from a choice of movie Topics (I have a separate table with ~ 150 Topics).
• The Users choices are saved in a ‘Alert Topics’ text field on the User table, and I use a ‘Split text’ (by comma) field to separate them out.
• When new movie reports are added to the App each night, they would be tagged with one or more ‘Topics’ e.g. ‘drama’, and ‘historic’.
• We want to alert those Users that have chosen, for example, either ‘historic’ or ‘drama’ (or both, of course) that a new report is available by showing a list of all matching reports on their ‘My Alerts’ screen.
• Reports will stay on the ‘My Alerts’ screen until a User ‘clears’ each Alert in the list, or they can also ‘Clears all Alerts’. As such, a User could end up with hundreds of Alerts on that screen. Currently, I was trying to filter the Reports collection on ‘My Alerts’ screen using ‘Show Alert’=True - this is the User-specific column I created in the Reports table.

That’s a very sound approach. I don’t think I would change that much. Let’s keep everything until step 4.

So, you have a relation/query of all matching reports, and then a user-specific boolean column to indicate whether they have read it or not.

• If you haven’t, add an “Added at” column to your reports table, that stores the timestamp at the point of adding.
• For your “Clear all Alerts” button, add a “Last clear all” column to your users table. The “Clear all Alerts” button would write the current timestamp to that column, in your signed-in user’s row.
• Filter your matching alerts by either “Show Alert = True” (I would have assumed you do something like “Read?”, and hide an item when “Read” is true instead), OR the “Added at” column is before “Clear all Alerts”.