How to listen to a third party account for stellar transactions from now?

Question

I used paymentRequest.stream to start listen to events for a third party account.

But it gets all events from the beginning if I don't provide a paging token. As it is a third party account, my client side application doesn't listen to the event all the time, so it doesn't have the latest pagingToken. So I will get a lot of events from the past.

Is there a way for me just to start listening to future events for a third party account? Which means I only want to listen on events from the time the client runs, but ignores everything in the past?

Answer 1

Not 100% sure about Java SDK, but JavaScript SDK allows to specify "now" as a cursor to be notified of payments happening starting from when this script runs.

Edit:

Looks like the method mentioned above doesn't work with Java SDK. The alternative approach requires two calls instead of one, but it was battle-tested and guaranteed to work.

Prepare request builder for transactions, set limit to 1 and execute it. Once you get the response, you have a paging_token for the first transaction in a list that can be specified as a cursor in streaming mode. If the first request returns zero rows, it means that there were no transactions on this account and you can safely omit a cursor in a streaming request call.