What's up with all the different cursors?

[mycroftcanner]

HI all,

Just trying to understand the difference between the different cursors returned when getting the Inbox.

The raw response contains:
oldestCursor
newestCursor
previousCursor
nextCursor

In Swiftagram we are using the oldestCursor to paginate. Is there any particular reason why? What is the difference between all of these? Intuitively, I would have expected nextCursor to be the one required.

Thanks

[sbertix]

Hey @mycroftcanner,

I'm assuming you're referring to direct related Endpoints.
The simplest response would be: "cause Instagram does this themselves".
Without going into much detail, let's take threads pagination as an example, as the mechanism for the inbox is slightly more complicated as there's a lot of boilerplate code in the response that is never actually used (I'm assuming it comes down to the several iterations of the messaging API): using "oldest" and "newest" simply guarantees time-based sorting. Most times they'd be the same (as messages cannot be scheduled) but it's a neat bonus.