Empty list of notifications - php

Question

I am building a custom social network in php and mysqli. I have a page called notifications.php that shows the user site notifications as well as friend requests! put simply all I want to do is allow the user to purge his notifications list by clicking on a button!
in my html I have this...
<p><span id="purgeList"><?php echo $purgeList; ?></span></p>
<h2>Notifications</h2><?php echo $notification_list; ?></div>
and so far all I have for the button is this....
<?php
$purgeList = '<button disabled>Purge your List</button>';
if ($notification_list == true){
$purgeList = '';
}
?>
The notifications themselves gets pulled in using this script!
$notification_list = "";
$sql = "SELECT * FROM notifications WHERE username LIKE BINARY '$log_username' ORDER BY date_time DESC LIMIT 5";
$query = mysqli_query($db_conx, $sql);
$numrows = mysqli_num_rows($query);
if($numrows < 1){
$notification_list = "You do not have any notifications";
} else {
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($query, MYSQLI_ASSOC)) {
$noteid = $row["id"];
$initiator = $row["initiator"];
$app = $row["app"];
$note = $row["note"];
$date_time = $row["date_time"];
$date_time = strftime("%b %d, %Y", strtotime($date_time));
$notification_list .= "<p><a href='user.php?u=$initiator'>$initiator</a> | $app<br />$note</p>";
}
}
mysqli_query($db_conx, "UPDATE users SET notescheck=now() WHERE username='$log_username' LIMIT 1");

Answer 1

If you are looking for a way to remove their notifications on the fly, you will need to do an XHR request (also known as AJAX)
for documentation on this you can visit jQuery API for more info on that.
you can cause them to reload the page to go to delete their notifications then use a header redirect to send them back to their 'news feed'
In my opinion i would use ajax because it does not cause a page reload and it can happen dynamically.
Hope this helps =)