Question

I am working on a notification system on my website for users. I have a table for “events” that a user is notified of when they happen (friend requests, new followers, comments, etc.). Is there a way to insert a value like say 0 for unread and 1 for read in the //read column of the events table, for a particular event (upon request of the information by the user)? So that it is no longer notification worthy?

Answer 1

Yep. Just store your column as TINYINT(1). The MySQL literal TRUE evaluates to 1 and FALSE evaluates to 0, as expected.

(This is assuming your events table stores the individual events that get assigned to users, not the general event types that can occur.)

Usage

SELECT * FROM events WHERE user_id = [user_id] AND read = 0    #list all for user
UPDATE events SET read = 1 WHERE event_id = [event_id]         #mark as read