CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpfeedgetstream-io
Marcello Fuschi
Marcello Fuschi

Reputation: 99

Handling activities data with Getstream.io without having them stored in your database

I have been trying Getstream.io but they don't allow you to handle the activities data freely (e.g. you are not allowed to retrieve more than a limited amount of activities at the same time, nor you can make specific queries to search for a given activity of which you don't know the ID). They mention that in the docs, recommending to: "Keep a copy of the activity stored in your own database. It makes it easier to sync updates and it allows you run custom reporting and queries on your end." By the way, I can't understand what they mean with "it makes it easier to sync updates". However, I suppose they recommend to keep your own activities database so that you can fetch the activities' IDs you need and then use them to make changes to the actual activities data on their servers. I find it messy and I'd like to know whether or not I'm getting it right.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 861

Answers (1)

Ken Hoff
Ken Hoff

Reputation: 247

I think that you're thinking about this the correct way.

We usually recommend that developers only store IDs / references to objects (posts/tweets, user profiles, song/playlists, whatever) in Stream for a couple reasons:

  1. If you ever need to update the objects in the activity, you only need to update it in one place (your database), as opposed to in every feed that activity shows up in
  2. Less bytes stored in Stream == faster fanouts, less latency for the end user

Storing IDs in Stream and then "enriching" (hydrating / deserializing) the data on read might seem a little messy, but it works pretty well at scale :)

Here's some more docs on the subject: https://getstream.io/docs/#enrichment

Hopefully this helps! Let me know if I can answer any other questions for ya.

Upvotes: 2

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