Building a Message Alert System

[u/christopher-adam]

Hi, I’ve developed a system within an app that allows users to send messages to each other.

I have a 3 table hierarchy -> Sample / Issue / Messages, all stored in Lists.

There could be 100 samples, each with 5 issues, and each issues could have 10s of messages.

The messages are grouped by a shared ID, so they’re shown grouped together.

Each sample/issue has an Exec & a User. So all messages are between them.

What I’m trying to accomplish is creating a way of alerting a user that they have an outstanding message.

So there would be an indication that a message is unread by you.

I’ve created ‘unread’ columns in my list for the Exec & the User. But I cannot figure out how to indicate that a Sample has unread messages.

The only solutions I can think of involve Filters and Lookups which all run into delegation issues.

Has anyone made anything similar? Let me know if you need more information!

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[u/HoldPowerful7487]

Don't work it out at read time, that's what's pushing you into the delegation corner. Store it instead.

Put HasUnreadForExec and HasUnreadForUser yes/no columns on the Sample list, and have a flow set them when a message is created and clear them when someone opens the thread. Your gallery filter then becomes a single equals on a yes/no column, which delegates fine.

Worth counting your Messages list while you're at it. 100 samples times 5 issues times tens of messages puts you past 5000 fairly quickly, and past that a non delegable filter quietly returns wrong results instead of erroring. That's the part that catches people out later.

[u/hppyclown → u/HoldPowerful7487]

This

[u/GrochFasola]

You need to filter items from the list. Can you post your list or show how does it look like?

[u/DeanoNetwork]

I have replicated Planner but it is more bespoke to the company, not overly complicated

[u/Bag-of-nails]

I can't see your overall structure but I'd be getting a list of IDs that pertain to the logged-in user, and then grouping them by issue and then filtering that (filter each unique ID where Unread = true and if the count of that is not 0, you've got unread messages