Forum OpenACS Development: Reminder Notifications

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1: Reminder Notifications
Posted by Ryan Gallimore on 08/24/06 12:11 AM
I saw a few abandoned posts for reminder notifications for Calendar. Is anyone working on this? Does anyone have any suggestions?

I implemented it in Calendar myself using a simple "remind me x days before" dropdown and a scheduled proc to send out the reminder mail.

Any further ideas?

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2: Re: Reminder Notifications (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 08/24/06 02:25 AM
Ryan,

I am looking to using the notification_date field in notifications table to schedule a notification for a certain time.

I am looking into this because News allows you to publish an item in the future and there isn't a simple way to trigger the notifications after publishing.

A similar feature would work for reminders.

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3: Re: Reminder Notifications (response to 2)
Posted by Ryan Gallimore on 08/24/06 06:58 AM
This sounds good if one only wanted a reminder notification, but what if I want to be notified the instant the item was created, and then a reminder one day before?

Can I create two notification requests for the same item?

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4: Re: Reminder Notifications (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 08/24/06 01:35 PM
Ryan,

Good point.

You situation is one where you want a notification _request_ to ask for notification later. This is different than scheduling all notificaitons for a certain item to go out at a certain time.

This is a major shortcoming in notifications, since you can only schedule intervals or notification. Back in OpenACS 3 you could get weekly notifications on a certain day, for example.

I definitely think the interval concept needs to be improved or removed for a scheduled date/time schedule.

As I am poking around in notifications, I'll see if there is a place to acommodate these various use cases.

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5: Re: Reminder Notifications (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 08/25/06 04:27 PM
Ryan,

Look at notification::new tcl proc https://openacs.org/api-doc/proc-view?proc=notification%3a%3anew
which has the concept of "dynamic"notifications. So you could create a notification on a calendar item, that is sent to just the person who requested the reminder.

Along with that, my experiement for scheduling notifications for a certain time and date was successul and I will be adding this to CVS later today. I can tag/release notificaitons for 5.2 for this after some more testing.

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6: Re: Reminder Notifications (response to 5)
Posted by Matthew Coupe on 08/25/06 04:35 PM
Hey,

I have a request at the moment for an admin to be able to hit a 'set reminder' button when creating a calendar entry so that all members of the dotlrn community/class would get spammed with a reminder for that item. Would this also be possible with notifications?

Cheers,
Matthew

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7: Re: Reminder Notifications (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 08/25/06 04:54 PM
Yes it is. See the api-doc for notification::new. There is a -force flag which means "send a notification even if the recipient didn't ask for it"
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8: Re: Reminder Notifications (response to 1)
Posted by Alberto Pesquera Martín on 09/05/06 02:17 PM
Hi,

We (UNED) have been implemented a system of calendar's reminder recently. The idea is, as you have explained it, to notify users (personal or groups) of calendar events x days before.

Our exposition was: 1) to use the notifications when the events are added/modified. 2) A schedule procedure daily that checks the notifications and sends the corresponding reminders.

The code is available at http://cervero.innova.uned.es/dotLRN/calendar-reminder.tar.bz2 . I hope it will be useful for you.

As we are a few with the same need, it would be interested to work together on a common reminder solution and contribute it to community.

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9: Re: Reminder Notifications (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 09/05/06 02:42 PM
You don't need any additional code to support reminder notifications. The changes can me made when you create the notificaiton objects.

I have made a change that allows you to pass in the notification date/time and then the notificaiton will go out at that time only. I had to make one change to a query to support this.

As soon as I finish testing this can go into OpenACS and I can release a new notiifcations version.

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10: Re: Reminder Notifications (response to 9)
Posted by Ryan Gallimore on 09/05/06 04:04 PM
Dave - this sounds great. Will this change support both the standard delivery of the notification (e.g. instantly) in addition to the reminder x days before?

Or do you need to call the notification proc twice?

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11: Re: Reminder Notifications (response to 1)
Posted by Dave Bauer on 09/05/06 04:32 PM
Ryan,

I hadn't thought about that. I believe the most straightforward thing to do is to call it every time you need ot schedule a notification.

IE: Scheduling a reminder is different than a "subscription" to an entire calendar. Instant notification means you want to be notified when an object is added. And that is done when the object is created.

A reminder is someting personal and is requested by the user on an individual calendar item.

Right now the api doesn't have the flexibility to pass in a list of users, and their choosen subscriptions. Eventually we should add additional intervals or notification types that support automatic scheduled notifications. That will require more work.