Forum OpenACS Development: News package notification bug

When a notification request is created on the news package on the same day as the release date for a news item, the notifications aren't sent.

When the notifications are swept, the request creation date must be less than or equal to the notification date. News currently sets the notification date to the publish date, which has a granularity of 'day'. The request creation_date is set to a full timestamp, but the notification date is set to the same day at midnight, never satisfying the condition.

Notifications will not be sent until a new item is sent on the next day.

I'd like to avoid adding minutes granularity to dates in the news package, as it explicity calls for days in the code. Does anyone have any suggestions for dealing with this issue?

This revealed another problem when using the -subset switch in notification::new

The request object is created for the action_id a few ms after the publish_date. This notification is again missed by the sweeper b/c of the condition above.

I had to awkwardly set the acs_objects.creation_date of the request object to publish_date to resolve the problem.

I suspect this might be a problem outside of the news package. I'm happy to commit my fix if there's interest.

Well 1) my fix is a kludge - maybe someone else has a better idea, and 2) it's a core package so waiting for some feedback doesn't hurt.

I'm not surprised the news package has issues, but notifications is pretty solid. I guess the more esoteric subset support is not often used.

Right, that's the problem, so the publish_date is 2012-05-02 00:00:00 which is *less* than the request creation date of, say, 2012-05-02 18:38:00.

The sweeper query requires that the request creation_date <= notif_date which in this case is the publish date down to the day. See notification/tcl/sweep-procs-postgresql.xql

The same issue appears when the subset feature is used since the request is created ms after the item.

Correct. My snippet above should fix it. It's a corner case since it only applies when you subscribe and an item is created on the same day. If the item is created in the future, you don't have to worry.

Can't use the creation_date as the notification shouldn't go out until the news item is actually published.