Xano Customer Q&A with Bobby Valentine

In this guide, we'll walk through how to use Xano to calculate user authority scores for a social app, based on user interactions and activity. This score can be used to rank users, weight their actions (e.g. likes, comments), or determine their influence within the app's community.

Understanding the Requirements

Let's imagine a simple scenario with three users: Prakash, Bobby, and Chris. Each user's authority score is determined by a combination of factors:

1. The number of days they've been active on the system
2. The number of certain activities they've performed (e.g. posting, commenting, etc.)
3. The weighted sum of likes/interactions they've received from other users, based on those users' authority scores

Essentially, a user's authority score is higher if they've been active for a longer period, engage with the app frequently, and receive positive interactions from other high-authority users.

Setting Up the Data Model

In Xano, we'll need to create a few data models to represent the necessary entities:

1. Users: Stores user information like username, join date, etc.
2. Activities: Represents different types of activities users can perform (posting, commenting, etc.).
3. UserActivities: Tracks individual user activities, including the activity type and timestamp.
4. Interactions: Represents interactions between users, such as likes or comments, linking the source user, target user, and the associated activity.

Calculating User Authority Scores

To calculate the user authority scores, we'll create an API endpoint in Xano that performs the following steps:

1. Retrieve User Activities: Get all user activities within a specified time range (e.g., last 30 days).
2. Calculate Activity Score: For each user, calculate an activity score based on the number and types of activities performed.
3. Calculate Interaction Score: For each user, calculate an interaction score by summing the weighted interactions received from other users. The weight is determined by the other user's authority score.
4. Calculate Authority Score: Combine the activity score and interaction score, potentially with other factors like the user's join date, to calculate the final authority score for each user.
5. Update User Scores: Store the calculated authority scores in the Users data model.

Here's a high-level overview of how this process might look in Xano:

1. Create an API endpoint called `calculateAuthorityScores`.
2. In the endpoint's function stack, add a step to retrieve all `UserActivities` and `Interactions` within the specified time range.
3. Iterate through each user and calculate their activity score based on the retrieved `UserActivities`.
4. For each user, iterate through the `Interactions` and calculate the weighted interaction score using the authority scores of the interacting users.
5. Combine the activity score and interaction score, along with any other factors, to calculate the final authority score for each user.
6. Update the `Users` data model with the calculated authority scores.

This process can be scheduled to run periodically (e.g., daily or weekly) to ensure that user authority scores remain up-to-date based on recent activity and interactions.

Delivering User Authority Scores to the Frontend

Once the user authority scores are calculated and stored in the `Users` data model, you can expose an API endpoint that allows your frontend application to retrieve and display these scores. For example, you could create an endpoint called `getUserAuthority` that takes a user ID as input and returns the corresponding authority score from the `Users` data model.

Your frontend application can then make API calls to this endpoint whenever it needs to display a user's authority score, such as on their profile page or in activity feeds.

By leveraging Xano's powerful backend capabilities, you can implement complex logic to calculate user authority scores based on various factors and deliver these scores to your frontend application seamlessly.