Skip to main content

The Follow Feature


In my last blog, I described how I dealt with the user profile issue I faced but it wasn't over, a bigger issue was yet to be solved. Instagram has given us a really good feature which we call "Follow", that lets us follow any other user and see whatever they post or in simpler words whatever they want the world to see. Simple, isn't it? Well in programming point of view, not really. Friends and Followers are the next most important part of an SNS (Social networking site). Why shouldn't it be? Most of the people use them so they could showoff things to other friends, family or someone totally unknown just because it somehow makes them feel valued. What kind of a disorder is that? Well, that's a totally different story which we are not supposed to discuss now. This feature so important because what's the point of calling it a social networking site when you don't have a network. So this problem is solved by me in the following manner
To begin with, let me tell you an interesting fact. Following on Instagram is quite different from friends on facebook. Friends in Facebook is a symmetrical relationship, I am your friend and hence you are my friend but following is not a symmetrical relationship, if you are interested in my stuff you can follow me and look at my stuff but I don't have to see your stuff until I am interested. Not exactly an interesting fact you expected but for the beginners like me, you got to know some technical terminology. There are many solutions to this problem and I am going to discuss the solutions I know. The first solution is a many to many relationships from the user table to itself. Don't be too confused and read the last line again. As you are following my blog you must be knowing what one to one and many to many relationships are. As your follower is also a user, a user can have many followers and many users can follow a user, Many to many relationships suit the situation. Done?  Not really, told you it isn't that easy. In Django for any relation, the reverse is also possible. To be simple all relations are symmetrical by default. This troubled me a lot and then our friend StackOverflow help and there is a keyword argument that could be passed in order to prevent this symmetrical relation, that is "symmetrical=False". This was one way of doing it. Another way of doing it, which I found suited my need best was maintaining a different table for the relation, each record of this new table will be having two fields follower and following, both of them would be users, hence each relation would be stored in a table and it would be convenient for our needs such as follower count and following count. I want to say this again, that this approach is best suited to my needs in My opinion and this is not the standard or the best way if any other way suits your situation well feel free to use it.
In this way, I have solved the problem of how to store the following details. Stay in touch for my further explorations 😉

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Working With AJAX

In the last post, we discussed the error I have got and how I overcame those. In this blog, we will see how I dealt with AJAX. To begin with, all of you have used some social media like facebook, Instagram etc and all of them have some things in common. One of them is the like feature. Yow can like anything you find useful, fun or interesting. That simple "like" feature. Many of the normal users don't observe this actually, they don't have to observe this but whenever you hit the like button or double-tap in Instagram and the information that you liked that post is sent to the server, saved in the databases and some indication is given to you as well, so that you know that you have liked this post. All of this happens without the page getting reloaded. This sounds like usual stuff to the normal people but it's not as simple as it looks like. Not for an amateur web developer who has just started with web developing Generally, if we wish to make a get request to ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The User Profile

This is my second blog about my Instagram project and till now I am confronted with many questions and problems, two such problems are how to store the user profile and how to implement the "follow" feature of Instagram. In this blog, I will describe the prior problem To any social networking site, the most important component is its end user. The user has his/her important role in the functioning of a social networking site and that part doesn't need a description. Till now, for all my mini projects, whenever the user was required I have used the User model of the Django framework, but this is something different. An SNS(social networking site) always has a user profile which holds a wide variety of information such as status, display picture, email, links to other sites etc but the Django's User model has only some fields namely first name, last name, email, username, password. Only this handful of information cannot account for the user profile. I know many of y...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Beginning

This is the beginning of my Django project. I  have decided that first, I will work on the Django part making my server working and then I will work on the user interface using REACT. As I have just started, I am highly confused about what kind of models to be used how my user profiles must look like etc. For making a successful website or any other project in that case, these initial thinking play a vital role as if not done at an early stage of a project, it becomes very hard to make some minimal changes when you have written a sufficient amount of code. As a human, I learn from my own mistakes and for those who are thinking about what makes me so sure that it is difficult to make changes later own, this statement is the answer.  For those who are new to Django or even to programming, Models are the way you represent your data in Django. These contain important information such as how many fields are there, what kind of data is represented in each and every field. Dja...
Post a Comment
Read more