BP REST API Messages endpoint does not return latest message in excerpt field

[niftythree]

Hello again,

As you may know from our previous thread, we’re working on the messaging portion of our mobile app which interfaces to the BP REST API. We’ve noticed that the “messages” endpoint in the API returns an “excerpt” which is quite handy. However, it’s not necessarily the excerpt of the most recent message, instead it's an excerpt of the last message in the current batch returned by the API. To get the actual latest message it is necessary to call the messages endpoint repeatedly until it has reached the end of each of the message threads, which is not very efficient from the app’s end and slows things down quite a bit. Would it be possible to change this so that the excerpt returned is of the latest message? (i.e. when retrieving the Inbox, the excerpt would be the last incoming message, when retrieving the Sentbox the excerpt would be from the last outgoing message).

Thank you.

[espellcaste]

@niftythree Good catch! This is actually a bug in the implementation. Since we are getting paginated batch of messages, we are actually losing the last one which is the lastest message.

I'll work on a fix.

[niftythree]

Hi @espellcaste,

Thanks for looking into this. We actually thought this was how it was originally intended to work. 🙂

Trac ticket: ​https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/8696

@imath Could you take another look? I improved the implementation to handle the cache in a better way.

[espellcaste]

In 13402:

BP_Messages_Thread: return the *right* latest message.

Introducing a new method get_latest_thread_message() to the BP_Messages_Thread class which returns the latest message of a thread.

Closes ​https://github.com/buddypress/buddypress/pull/52
Fixes #8696