Activity Feed

Copy link to clipboardAdd an Activity Feed to your application 

Activity Feeds shows information in realtime in a list form. Information can be actions, system events or data being published in realtime. This allows a user to be informed without the need to refresh their page. Activity feeds can be published from a 3rd party service or from within your application.

Copy link to clipboardEvent Types

Activity Feeds may consist of multiple event types, for example, sports scores, commentary, red card alerts etc. Adding filters helps users to consume only the data they wish to receive. A user could select scores for example.

Copy link to clipboardWhere can I use Activity Feeds?

• Live news/commentary

• Sports event updates

• In-app notifications for software

• Social Media feeds

• Audit/Historical actions of a task management software

Copy link to clipboardOther Possible Features?

You can incorporate more functionality within your Activity Feeds such as:

• Adding an indicator which signals to the user that there is new information to load.

• Changing the look and feel of an event within a feed.

Copy link to clipboardBuilding your Activity Feed

Ably has simple yet powerful APIs to help you to build Activity Feeds to enrich the end user experience.

Copy link to clipboardAbly Channels

Channel is the unit of distribution of messages. Messages represent information, channels can be used to segment the feeds. For example, different matches in a sports event, types of information or tenants. Users or their devices can subscribe to a specific or multiple channels.

• channels.get - to get an existing or create a new channel

Copy link to clipboardAbly Pub/Sub Messaging

Pub/Sub is an architectural pattern used to distribute real-time information, as messages. Messages can be of any format. This can be advantageous to segment an activity feed into different types, which can be used to change the look and feel of an information card.

• channel.subscribe - to subscribe to messages on a channel

• channel.publish(data) - to publish a message on a channel

Copy link to clipboardAbly Rewind/History

History provides access to historical messages. This can be used to see previously published messages. 

• channel.history - to get a paginated history of channel messages

Rewind allows you to specify, at the time of attaching to a channel, where to start the attachment from. This is another way to get historical information consistently if subscribing and receiving messages from a channel without using another API.

Copy link to clipboardGetting started: Activity Feeds checklist

You'll need to do the following to get started with adding an Activity Feed to your application.

• Implement the UI for the Activity Feed

• Consider the integration needed to publish events into feeds

• Develop a storage mechanism to persist data for longer than Ably's limits

Copy link to clipboardWhat's next?

• Sign up for a free Ably account

• Download one of our SDKs

• Explore all other examples