Notifications id bug

[Peter]

Hi,

I noticed that the notifications method is not returning the notifications' ids anymore.

Is this a bug or has there been a change in the API?

[Peter]

Nevermind, it's working now.

[Peter]

It's broken again... all notifications have the same id "1"

[Jon]

Hi Peter,

You're right - we're changing the way we store notifications, and one side effect is that notifications don't have unique ids anymore. You'll only be able to retrieve the total list of notifications by user, not individual notifications.

We put in a dummy placeholder of "1" because we saw at least one client failed when it was expecting to see an id field.

Is this a problem for your application, and if so, could you explain how?

Thanks
Jon

[Peter]

Thanks for your reply Jonathan.
My app relies on notification ids since it retrieves notifications on a regular basis in the background and saves the unread notifications (by ids) for the user to see later.
I don't see any other workaround like using the body field (since 2 different notifications may have the same body) or a timestamp.
Can you suggest a workaround or grant my app permission to access ids? I don't need to retrieve individual notifications, just the full list but with ids.

[Jon]

Unfortunately, there are no longer individual ids. The combination of all the data in the notification (the user ids, the message, etc.) should be unique, so could you make an md5 signature or similar out of that?

[Peter]

That's a possibility, yes.
Anyway, I can use the url instead of the id since it's unique.
Unless you're planning on removing urls too?

[Jon]

Nope, not planning to remove urls or anything else. Hope that will work for you!