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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-01T14:46:01+00:00

I have a simple MySQL table for storing notification in a web with social

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I have a simple MySQL table for storing notification in a web with social networking feature written in PHP. 

+----------------------+
| Notifications        |
+----------------------+
| (PK) notification_id |
| user_id              |
| uri                  |
| message              |
| seen                 |
| created_at           |
+----------------------+
  • notification_id is PK (pretty self-explanatory)
  • user_id is the ID of user who gets the notification
  • uri is the internal URI where the browser will go when the user clicked the notification, mostly it links to the individual occured event page (such as linking to a user’s photo permalink when the notification is about someone commenting at it)
  • message is the notification message
  • seen is stored as boolean, it indicates wether the notification has been read or not (it is the most important part in this question)
  • created_at is just a timestamp

I have done most of the notification mechanism, but the remaining is the seen/unseen part.

I want to show only the unseen notification in the dropdown menu in the top navigation bar (like Facebook does), and the user can click a link to the page showing all notifications.

Where is the best place to put the code to trigger marking it as seen? It should be marked ‘seen’ when the designated user has read the notification content and get to the individual event page (ie. by clicking it)

I have thought of some methods, another alternatives are welcome.

  • Using javascript to intercept user’s click on notification and make ajax request to ‘mark as seen’ before proceeding to notification’s URI
  • Make PHP script in the destination URL to update the seen record in the database. The problem with this method is there is no relationship between the individual post with the notification record.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If I were in a similar situation (and I hadn’t implemented an events system), I’d have the notification link be to a pass-through script. Within that script, just have it mark the notification as seen and redirect the user on. Since your notifications and objects aren’t related, you could use GET request parameters (?type=photo&id=1&notification=1) to figure out which object and such.

    I don’t recommend using Javascript to do it… It’s too unreliable, in my opinion. You never know if the user actually has Javascript enabled on their browser and such.

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