Basics | Plugins | Howtos | Applications

The notify plugin

This plugin adds functionality for managing notification messages. Lino shows notifications on your dashboard, sends them as Email notifications and/or pushes them as Desktop notifications.

Overview

notification message

A message sent by a Lino site to a user of the site.

broadcast notification

A notification message sent to all users of a site.

notification message type

The type of a notification message.

A Lino application defines a list of notification message types, and a site manager can mask certain notification message types for certain user types in order to filter out notifications of this type for users of this type.

Similar functionalities

Don’t mix up notifications with comments (implemented by lino.modlib.comments). Comments are similar to notifications in that they describe some “event” that happened to some database object, but unlike notifications, comments are never addressed to a single recipient. And while notifications are to be delivered to their recipients as quickly as possible, comments are rather long-term historic entries, visible to every user who has the required permission.

Don’t mix up notifications with system notes (implemented by lino_xl.lib.notes), similar to comments.

Unlike comments and system notes, the history of notifications is stored only for a limited time, usually a few weeks. Also the sender of a notification message is always the site itself, not a user. That is, you cannot ask Lino to show you a “list of all notification messages emitted by a given user”.

Email notifications

Every site user can specify in their user settings whether and how often they want to get notified via email.

Desktop notifications

desktop notifications

A feature that displays instant messages issued by a Lino site to the display of a client device, potentially with an acoustic or vibration signal.

How to enable desktop notifications on your device:

  • The Lino site must have been configured to send notifications. And the Lino application must use the notify plugin. And if the application uses the plugin, the server administrator may still have disabled desktop notifications.

  • You must open a browser window and sign in to the Lino site.

  • Your browser must ask your permission to show desktop notifications from that website, and you must answer “Yes”.

Marking notifications as seen

Independently of whether notifications have been delivered via email and as desktop notification, Lino displays unseen notification messages in the dashboard where it also provides an action for marking individual message as seen.

A common caveat is that Lino does not know whether you saw the desktop notification or the email. That’s why all notifications remain on your dashboard until you tick them off explicitly.

  • It can be disturbing to read a message again in the dashboard if you have just read by email or as a desktop notification.

  • Some users tend to not care about marking their notifications as seen in the dashboard, which causes their “My notification messages” to become overfilled and useless.

  • Don’t misunderstand the My notifications widget as a to-do list, which is not a good idea.

There is no perfect solution for these problems. One workaround is to instruct Lino to also delete unseen notifications automatically, by setting keep_unseen to False. Here is an example which also increases remove_after to 180 days (6 months):

SITE.plugins.notify.configure(remove_after=180, keep_unseen=False)

Users can hide the MyMessages widget in their user settings if lino.modlib.dashboard is installed as well. But that’s not a recommended solution. If you see that users of your application are doing this, you should analyze why they do it and e.g. add filtering options.

Possible optimizations of the system:

  • Marking notifications as seen in the dashboard can be a bit slow because Lino refreshes the whole dashboard after every click. We could avoid this using javascript which sets the item to hidden instead of calling refresh.

  • Add a &notify=123456” (the id of the message) to every link in the email so that when the user follows one of them, the message can get marked as seen.

The owner of a message

Every notification message usually has an owner. The owner is another database object that represents the “topic” of this message. It expresses what this message is about.

Lino can optionally make that a given site user will receive only the first notification message about a given owner. Any following message is ignored until the site user has marker the first message as seen. Typical use case are the messages emitted by ChangeNotifier: you don’t want to get 10 mails just because a colleague makes 10 small modifications when authoring the text field of an observed database object.