Creating and publishing notifications

This section walks you through creating and publishing notifications using the Atoti Notification Service.

Create your notification

To create a notification, there are a number of building blocks you need to specify. These are the user-defined fields, actions, and any potential restrictions you might want to apply to specific users. You also have a few builder methods to choose from.

User-defined fields

Notifications in the Atoti Notification Service are represented by the Notification class. The user-defined fields of a Notification are:

Actions

Notifications may have actions users can take once received, represented by the NotificationAction class. The following default actions are provided when using the Notification.notificationWithDefaultActionsBuilder() method:

Restricting notifications to specific users

In some cases, you may want to control which users receive a specific notification. You can use the following optional fields to only publish notifications to specific users:

Builders

In the Notification class, you can build your notification with the following builder methods:

Once you have chosen the builder method to use, create the notification:

Notification notification = Notification.notificationWithDefaultActionsBuilder()
    .title("My Custom Notification")
    .description("This is a sample notification")
    .severity(NotificationSeverity.MEDIUM)
    .classifiers(List.of("category 1", "custom-classifier"))
    .build();

Publish your notification

All management of notifications is handled by the INotificationService. Follow these steps to publish your notifications:

1. Inject the INotificationService where you need to publish notifications

This a Spring service, so you can inject it into your components using your preferred method. For example:

@Autowired private INotificationService notificationService;

2. Create your notifications

Referencing the Create your notification section above, create your notification(s) using the builder methods provided.

3. Publish your notifications

Once you have your notifications created, use the service to publish them:

notificationService.publishNotification(notification);

OR

notificationService.publishNotifications(List.of(notification1, notification2, notification3));

Publishing technical notifications

The service also supports publishing technical notifications. These are notifications that are not intended for end-users, but rather for communicating information to REST clients.

Technical notifications are not stored in the service and are not sent to new listeners upon subscription. They are only sent to eligible listeners that are currently subscribed at the time the notification is received by the service.

You can publish technical notifications using the following method, which accepts a variable number of Notification objects:

notificationService.publishTechnicalNotifications(notification);

OR

notificationService.publishTechnicalNotifications(List.of(notification1, notification2, notification3));

Updating notifications

When a notification is published, it is stored in the server so that when a user logs in, they receive all the notifications that are relevant to them. Some notifications may become obsolete after a certain period of time or based on a server event and need to be updated. In such cases, the status of the notification can be updated.

When updating the status, you’ll also specify a status code that indicates if the notification should continue being published for new subscriptions. The update will trigger an UPDATE_STATUS event in the EventStream to notify listeners.

To update the status of a notification, use the updateNotificationStatus method of the service and provide the following:

• The ID of the notification to update. You can use the getLiveNotifications or getNotificationsBySourceId method to retrieve the notifications after being published and determine their IDs.
• The new status of the notification.
• A NotificationStatusCode value:
  • OBSOLETE: The notification is no longer relevant and won’t be published for new subscriptions.
  • LIVE: The notification is still relevant and will still be published for new subscriptions.

// Create and publish a notification
Notification notification = Notification.notificationWithDefaultActionsBuilder()
    .title("My Custom Notification")
    .description("This is a sample notification")
    .severity(NotificationSeverity.MEDIUM)
    .classifiers(List.of("category 1", "custom-classifier"))
    .sourceId("task-123") // Used below to retrieve the notification ID
    .status("To do")
    .build();
notificationService.publishNotification(notification);
...
// Retrieve the notification ID and update the status
Integer notificationId = notificationService.getNotificationsBySourceId("task-123").getFirst().getId();
notificationService.updateNotificationStatus(notificationId, "Task completed by user1", NotificationStatusCode.OBSOLETE);

Atoti Notification Service REST API

The Atoti Notification Service provides a REST API that allows you to create and manage notifications in a running application. You can see the endpoints for your application in Swagger UI, under notification-rest-service: