ticky

Jessica

@ticky

im in ur web site

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ticky
@ticky

trying to interact with the API of my feed reader service and feeling like it was written by aliens

I want to find the subset of feed entries which are:

  1. unread,
  2. belong to a particular folder of feeds, and
  3. older than 𝑥 date

this appears to require requesting a complete list of unread entry IDs, and then either the complete list of entries, or entries for each target feed, OR each individual entry, and then checking they match

entry objects do not have a read state flag, that is entirely the domain of the list of unread entry IDs

and I can see from a database structure perspective why you might do that but also oof ouch ow my application will need to store and compute SO much state

wellllll, I wondered how the feed reader's own web UI handles it and it turns out... it cheats, it just has a bespoke endpoint which returns baked HTML of the unread entries, no futzing with the list of unread IDs, boo

then I realised that the source is published on GitHub, and I had a peek at the source and... it's not doing anything special to achieve that

class UnreadEntriesController < ApplicationController
  def update
    # there is code in this method but it's not relevant
  end
end
syntax highlighting by codehost

feedbin/feedbin/.../app/controllers/unread_entries_controller.rb

so... wait, unread entries are just a normal Rails model? there's no bespoke code for the route the web app uses? hold on a sec, what's the API doing then...

def index
  @user = current_user
  render json: @user.unread_entries.pluck(:entry_id).compact.to_json
end
syntax highlighting by codehost

feedbin/feedbin/.../app/controllers/api/v2/unread_entries_controller.rb

ah. it is a liar. this is (probably) not a database optimisation at all. they are not stored as a list of IDs at all. they're real database items. wtf.

so that's fun.

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It's the end of summer, so that means it's Get in the Car, Loser!'s second anniversary! ...wow, how has it been so long already? To everyone who's joined us on this adventure, thank you so much—it means the world to us!

For everyone else... to celebrate the anniversary, we're doing a special single day 50% off sale over on itch.io! There's no better time to enjoy the two years worth of bugfixes, patches, and new features we've added to the game since release—plus our biggest sale ever on the hefty universe-expanding story chapter The Fate of Another World, that tells the story of your favourite hero's favourite hero.

 
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