Add since=<date> to notifcations fetching

[CarolineDenis]

Fixes #2606

[maxpatiiuk]

looking good, though the logic is complicated, and important, thus I would encourage to take a bit of time to write tests for this (Feel free to ask chatgpt or Jason or me for help) - would also be good practice for the future

i.e mock the network requests using overrideAjax(), also mock INITIAL_INTERVAL to replace it with a smaller duration (i.e 1ms - so that the test doesn't take long time to run) - then inspect that the state is updated on first fetch and on second fetch like you would expect

[grantfitzsimmons]

@bronwyncombs discovered that the JSON responses were the same as in v7.9.

I found this to be strange, given that when I call the API when entering a valid date, I only see notifications added since that date.

That's when I realized that the notification was fetching notifications since this day, last month. It is one month behind...

https://fwri6123-issue-2606.test.specifysystems.org/notifications/messages/?since=2023-8-27+15%3A37%3A48

🤨

[maxpatiiuk]

looking great!

(except for the fact that older notifications are not fetched - thanks for catching that - that would have not been nice)

[grantfitzsimmons]

Screen.Recording.2023-09-29.at.9.16.26.AM.mp4

Audio quality has never been worse, I apologize.

One issue is #4050

the other issue is that all notifications before the current time are lost, even though they are stored in the database.

[grantfitzsimmons]

Looks like the issue with all notifications being fetched was fixed after redeploying.
#4050 is still a big prob– the fix might end up changing how this is implemented.

[maxpatiiuk]

this should probably also be stored in a ref - right now lastFetchedTimestamp value is lost on useEffect re-executions (happens every time the user opens/closes the notifications component)

[maxpatiiuk]

Longer explanation:

lastFetchedTimestamp stores the timestamp of last fetch
yet this is a variable you created in useEffect
so every time useEffect re-runs, the value of this variable is lost, and new variable is created
and useEffect has [isOpen] dependency array, thus it re-runs every time user opens or closes notifications panel

but it is not right to clear the value of that variable on user open/close of notifications as that shouldn't be related to lastFetchedTimestamp. Instead, lastFetchedTimestamp is related to "notifications" state (since lastFetchedTimestamp roughly describes when notifications state was last updated), so this variable should have the same lifecycle as the "notifications" hook

[maxpatiiuk]

Two issues. Can you please open a small follow-up pr for this?

Also, if needed, I would be happy to explain in more detail why these things are problem - so that hopefully you see these things in the future

[CarolineDenis]

Two issues. Can you please open a small follow-up pr for this?

Also, if needed, I would be happy to explain in more detail why these things are problem - so that hopefully you see these things in the future

new issue created called issue-2606-bis