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# Noticent
Noticent is a Ruby gem for user notification management. It is written to deliver a developer friendly way to managing application notifications in a typical web application. Many applications have user notification: sending emails when a task is done or support for webhooks or Slack upon certain events. Noticent makes it easy to write maintainable code for notification subscription and delivery in a typical web application.
[](https://app.codeship.com/projects/344893)
The primary design goal for Noticent is developer friendliness. Using Noticent, you should be able to:
- Create new notification types
- Tell the current state of notifications, subscriptions and distribution channels.
- Support multiple notification channels like email, chat applications, mobile push, webhooks and more.
- Test your notifications
## Installation
Add this line to your application's Gemfile:
```ruby
gem 'noticent'
```
And then execute:
```bash
bundle
```
Or install it yourself as:
```bash
gem install noticent
```
### Run Generators
```bash
rails g noticent:install
```
Now run the migrations
```bash
rake db:migrate
```
## Usage
Noticent is written to be used in a Rails application but you should be able to use it in other Ruby / Rack based applications if you need to.
### Basics
Noticent uses the following concepts:
#### Alert
Alert is a type of notification. For example, a new user signing up could be defined as an Alert.
#### Scope
Scope is like a namespace for Alerts. In many applications, you will only have 1 Scope. However, sometimes you might have different types of Alerts for different parts of your application. For example, "new blog post written" and "blog post updated" Alerts could be associated with the a "blog" Scope, while a "new comment added" Alert is associated with another Scope. Using Scope is useful when you have many different groups of Alerts in your application.
#### Channel
Channel is a distribution channel for your Alerts. Examples of Channels are Email, Slack, Webhook, Mobile or browser notification.
#### Recipient
Recipient is a person or system that receives Alerts. This could be a user for Channels like Email or a system for a Webhook Channel.
#### Payload
Payload is a data structure (class) that carries everything you'd need to send an Alert to a Recipient over a Channel.
#### Product
A product acts as a filter on alerts. For example, you might want to list different set of alerts for different parts of your application. To achieve that you can define each part as a product and use `applies.to` and `applies.not_to` to say how an alert applies to each part of the application.
Products don't have an effect on how alerts are run, but they can be used to list which alerts apply to each part of an application using `Noticent.configuration.product_by_alert` method.
If an alert doesn't have an `applies`, it will be applicable to none of the products defined.
### Integration
Noticent tries to make very few assumptions about your application, like what you call your Recipients or what your Scopes are. However it also enforces some opinions to make the whole system easier to use and maintain.
### Configuration
The most important part of using Noticent is the configuration part where you define scopes, channels and your alerts. Once configured, you can hook it up to the rest of your code. This example assumes integration in a Rails application.
If you have run the generators, you should now have a file called `config/initializers/noticent.rb`. You can edit it as you like:
```ruby
Noticent.configure do
channel :email
scope :account do
alert(:new_signup){ notify :owner}
alert(:new_team_member) { notify :users }
end
end
```
Now you'd need to tell Noticent how to send emails by creating an email channel. This can be done in `app/models/noticent/channels/email.rb`:
```ruby
class Email < ::Noticent::Channel
def new_signup
# send email here
end
def new_team_member
# send email here
end
end
```
Now that we have our channel, we can define a Payload. We can do this in `app/modesl/noticent/account_payload.rb`:
```ruby
class AccountPayload
attr_reader :account
attr_reader :current_user
def initializer(account_id, current_user)
@account = Account.find account_id
end
def users
@account.users
end
def owner
@account.owner
end
end
```
You can now create your email templates in `app/models/noticent/views/email` with 2 files called `new_signup.html.erb` and `new_team_member.html.erb` the same way you would write email templates for Rails mailers:
```html
Hello <%= @owner.name %>!
A new user just signed up.
```
and
```html
You now have a new team member. Make sure to say hi!
```
Until now, this is very much like Rail's own mailers and follows the same principles: Payload is like a model, Channel is the equivalent of a controller and the html view file is the view.
This first difference here is that you can use "front matter" in your views. This is useful when you need more than just text or HTML in your notifications. For an email channel, the front matter can hold a template for the email subject for example:
```html
subject: New member for <%= @team.name %>
---
Hello!
You now have a new team member who signed up as an admin for <%= @team.name %>
```
In the channel, you can use this:
```ruby
class EmailChannel < ::Noticent::Channel
def new_member
data, content = render
send_email(subject: data[:subject], content: content) # this is an example code
end
end
```
The `render` method looks for the right file under the `views` directory and loads and renders the ERB file while returning any front matter if available.
Use of front matter becomes more important in channels that have a more complex API like Slack (message color can be stored in the front matter) for example.
Now let's go back to our configuration file and see what else we can do. Here is an example of a Noticent configuration file in full:
```ruby
Noticent.configure do
hooks :pre_channel_registration, my_hooks
hooks :post_alert_registration, my_hooks
channel :email
channel :slack
channel :webhook, klass: MyWebhookChannel
channel :dashboard, group: :internal
product :product_foo
product :product_buzz
product :product_bar
scope :account, check_constructor: false do
alert :new_user do
applies.to :product_foo
notify :users
notify(:staff).on(:internal)
notify :owners
default true
end
end
scope :comment do
alert :new_comment, constructor_name: :some_constructor do
applies.not_to :product_buzz
notify :commenter
notify :author
default true
default(false) { on(:email) }
end
alert :comment_updated do
notify :commenter
end
end
scope :staff_comment, payload_class: AnotherPayloadClass do
alert :marked_as_answer do
notify(:staff).on(:internal)
end
end
end
```
### Sending Alerts
To send an Alert, call the `notify` method:
```ruby
account_payload = AccountPayload.new(1, user.first)
Noticent.notify(:new_user, account_payload)
```
While it is possible to define and use alert names as symbols, Noticent also creates a constant with the name of the alert under the `Noticent` namespace to help with the use of alert names.
By using the constants you can make sure alert names are free of typos.
For example, if you have an alert called `some_event` then after configuration there will be a constant called `Noticent::ALERT_SOME_EVENT` available to use with the value `:some_event`.
### Using Each Noticent Component
#### Payload
To understand how to use Noticent, it's important to know the conventions it uses. First, payloads: A payload is a class and should have methods named after each one of the recipient groups specified in the configuration. For example, if an alert should be sent to `users` then payload should have a method or attribute called `users`. This method is called at the point the notifications need to be sent to retrieve the recipients. It is up to you what each recipient is: it could be an email address (string) or the entire user object or an ID. Your channel class will be given this and should know how to handle it.
It is recommended to explicitly define the class type of each scope. This ensures integrity of the alerts in runtime:
```ruby
Noticent.configure do
scope :account, payload_class: SomeOtherClass do
#...
end
end
```
If specified, the type of the payload is checked against this class at runtime (when `Notify` is called).
To enforce development type consistency payload should have class method constructors that are named after the alert names. This can be turned off by setting `check_constructor` on scopes to `false`.
To share the same class method constructor for different alerts, you can use the `constructor_name` on alert to tell Noticent to look for a constructor that is not named after the alert itself.
This is a validation step only and doesn't affect the performance of Noticent.
#### Channel
Channels should be derived from `::Noticent::Channel` class and called the same as with the name of the channel with a `Channel` suffix: `email` would be `EmailChannel` and `slack` will be `SlackChannel`. Also, channels should have a method for each type of alert they are supposed to handle. Channel class can be changed using the `klass` argument during definition.
Channels can also have groups. If no group is supplied, a channel will belong to the `default` group. Groups can be used to send alerts to a subset of channels:
```ruby
Noticent.configure do
channel :email
channel :private_emails, group: :internal
channel :slack
channel(:team_slack, klass: Slack, group: :internal) do
using(fuzz: :buzz)
end
alert :some_event do
notify :users
notify(:staff).on(:internal)
end
end
```
In the example above, we are creating 2 flavors of the slack channel, one called `team_slack` but using the same class and configured differently. When `using` is used in a channel, any attribute passed into `using` will be called on the channel after creation with the given values.
For example, in this example, the `Slack` class is instantiated and attribute `fuzz` is set to `:buzz` on it before the alert method is called.
You can use `on` with a channel name instead of a channel group name instead:
```ruby
Noticent.configure do
channel :email
channel :private_emails, group: :internal
channel :slack
alert :some_event do
notify(:users).on(:internal) # this is a group name
notify(:staff).on(:slack) # this is a channel name
end
end
```
You can use `render` in the channel code to render and return the view file and its front matter (if available). By default, channel will look for `html` and `erb` as the file content and format. You can change these both when calling `render` or at the top of the controller:
```ruby
class SlackChannel < ::Noticent::Channel
default_format :json
default_ext :erb
end
```
or
```ruby
data, content = render(format: :erb, ext: :json)
```
You can also use a different layout for each render:
```ruby
data, content = render layout: 'my_layout'
```
By default, no layout is used.
#### Views
Views are like Rails views. Noticent supports rendering ERB files. You can also use layouts just like Rails. A layout is like a shared template `layout.html.erb`:
```html
This is at the top
<%= @content %>
This is at the bottom
```
`some_event.html.erb`:
```html
foo: bar
buzz: fuzz
---
This will be in the middle
```
Views can be of any type, like HTML or JSON which can be useful with API based channels.
## Opt-ins
Noticent uses a combination of channel, alert and scope to determine if a recipient has subscribed to receive an alert or not. By default it uses the `ActiveRecordOptInProvider` class which uses a single database table for the process. You can write your own Opt-in provider if you want to store subscription (opt-in) state in a different place. See `ActiveRecordOptInProvider` for what such provider requires to operate.
Use `Noticent.configuration.opt_in_provider`'s `opt_in`, `opt_out` and `opted_in?` methods to change the opt-in state of each recipient.
## Default Values
You can specify a default opt-in value for each alert. By default alerts have a default value of `false` (no opt-in) unless this is globally changed (see Customization section).
The default value for an alert can be set while this can also be changed per channel. For example:
```ruby
Noticent.configure do
channel :email
channel :slack
channel :webhook
scope :post do
alert :foo do
notify :users
default(true) # sets the default value for all channels for this alert to true
default(false) { on(:slack) } # sets the default value for this alert to false for the slack channel only
end
end
end
```
## Migration
Noticent provides a method to add new alerts or remove deprecated alerts from the existing recipients. To add a new alert type, you can use `ActiveRecordOptInProvider.add_alert` method:
```ruby
Noticent.opt_in_provider.add_alert(scope: :foo, alert_name: :some_new_alert, recipient_ids: [1, 2, 3, 5, 6], channel: :email)
```
This will opt-in recipients with the given IDs for the new alert on the `email` channel.
To remove any deprecated alert, use the `ActiveRecordOptInProvider.remove_alert` method:
```ruby
Noticent.opt_in_provider.remove_alert(scope: :foo, alert_name: :some_old_alert)
```
This removes all instances of the old alert from the opt-ins.
## New Recipient Sign up
When a new recipient signs up, you might want to make sure they have all the default alerts setup for them. You can achieve this by calling `Noticent.setup_recipient`:
```ruby
Noticent.setup_recipient(recipient_id: 1, scope: :post, entity_ids: [2])
```
This will adds the default opt-ins for recipient 1 on all channels that are applicable to it on scope `post` for entity 2.
## Validation
Every time Noticent starts, it runs some validations on the configuration, classes that are defined, channels and alerts to make sure they are defined correctly and the supporting classes are in compliance with the requirements.
## Testing Your Alerts
TO BE WRITTEN
## Hooks
Hooks are extension points for Noticent. You can register them in your configuration:
```ruby
Noticent.configure do
hooks.add(:pre_channel_registration, custom_hook)
end
```
The valid hook points are `pre_channel_registration`, `post_channel_registration`, `pre_alert_registration` and `post_alert_registration`. Once the hook point is reached, the given object is called on the same method name as with the hook name.
## Customization
The following items can be customized:
`base_dir`: Base directory for all Noticent assets.
`base_module_name`: Base module name for all Noticent assets.
`opt_in_provider`: Opt-in provider class. Default is `ActiveRecordOptInProvider`.
`logger`: Logger class. Default is `stdout`
`halt_on_error`: Should notification fail after the first incident of an error during rendering. Default is `false`
`default_value`: Default value for all alerts unless explicitly specified. Default is `false`
`use_sub_modules`: If set to true, Noticent will look for Channel and Scope classes in sub modules under the `base_module_name`.
With `use_sub_modules` set to false, a channel named `:email` should be called `Noticent::Email` (if `base_module_name` is `Noticent`), while with `use_sub_modules` set to true, the same class should be `Noticent::Channels::Email`.
For Payloads, the sub module name will be `Payloads`.
## Development
After checking out the repo, run `bin/setup` to install dependencies. You can also run `bin/console` for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.
To install this gem onto your local machine, run `bundle exec rake install`. To release a new version, update the version number in `version.rb`, and then run `bundle exec rake release`, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the `.gem` file to [rubygems.org](https://rubygems.org).
## Contributing
Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/khash/noticent.