Notifications

Details about our notification sub-system.

This sub-system is based on the Event::Base, EventSubscription and Notification classes.

Workflow

• An Event gets stored in the database
• clockwork periodically schedules a SendEventEmailsJob every 30 seconds.
• SendEventEmailsJob goes over the Event table and
  • sends e-mail for all Event that have email subscribers
  • creates Notification for all Event that have web/rss subscribers

Event And Subscription

An Event describes things that happen throughout the whole OBS (backend+frontend). For instance:

• A comment is added to a package
• Someone sent a submit request for a package

A Subscription is specific for a User, a Group, a type of Event (eventtype=Event::CommentForPackage), a Role the User might have (receiver_role="maintainer") and the place where it should be displayed (channel=web, channel=instant_email)

See the Events page for deeper information about Event & Subscription.

Notifications

A Notification is for a specific Event, a User (subscriber_id=1) and one or more places where it should be displayed (rss=true, web=false). There are mainly three types of notifications in OBS (Email, Web, and RSS).

Notifications for Web and RSS

These events generate notifications for Web and RSS.

• Event::ReviewWanted
• Event::RequestCreate
• Event::RequestStatechange
• Event::CommentForProject
• Event::CommentForPackage
• Event::CommentForRequest

Notifications for Email

In addition to the events mentioned above, email notifications use two addtional events.

• Event::BuildFail
• Event::ServiceFail

Triggering a Notification

All notifications are triggered with the help of SendEventEmailsJob. This job depends on:

• NotificationService::Notifier for Web and RSS feeds
• EventMailer for emails

NotificationService::Notifier takes the event object and notify the subscribers for Web and RSS feeds.

Avoiding Duplicate Notifications

OBS use mails_sent column in events table to keep track of the events that are notified, regardless of the channel (Web/RSS/Email). Once an event is notified mails_sent is set to true.