Notification system


SPS notification system

In SPS, there is a notification dropdown where developers can broadcast new messages to users. The dropdown is located on the top-right corner.

Notification Dropdown


When a notification item is clicked, details of the notification will be displayed in a modal.

Notification Detail Moadal

Official notification

If you only use the original SPS, we will send out new notifications every time we update the package or other important things that we want to inform you. You should see the icon of the dropdown becomes. + the message number. If there is no message or you have clicked the dropdown, it will become + 0.

Custom notification

If you do not want to receive the official notification or want to write your own note to your users, first let us understand how it works.

Mechanism

Every time when you run the sps() main function, it will look for a remote URL that stores the notification information in yaml{blk} format. If this file can be successfully parsed, you will see the notification dropdown menu on SPS UI, otherwise no dropdown displayed.

To define your own notification URL, you need to change the option note_url in the global.R file. Read more about changing SPS options. The default value is a file on Github, which also can be used as your template to write custom notification messages:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/systemPipeR/systemPipeShiny/master/inst/remote_resource/notifications.yaml{blk}

Notification template

If you download the link above, you should see something like this:

############ Create remote messages to notify users in the app #################
## When app starts, it will first try to load this file from online.
## You should place this file somewhere publically reachable online, like Github.
## This file should not be included in your app deployment.
## Add the url of this file to the SPS option `note_url` in "global.R" file

# type: one of 'package' or 'general', required
# expire: note will be displayed before the date, required, YYYY-MM-DD format
# title: string, required
# icon: any font-awesome icon name, default is the "info-circle"
# status: one of primary, success, info, warning, danger, default is "primary"
# pkg_name: string, required if type == 'package', such as "systemPipeShiny"
# version: string, required if type == 'package', such as "1.0.0"
# message: string, optional, the text body of the notification. Be careful with indentations.
- note:
    type: general
    pkg_name:
    version:
    title: Notification broadcasting
    expire: 2099-01-01
    icon:
    status:
    message: |
        ## SPS notifications
        What you are looking at is the SPS notification broadcasting system. It
        display messages to your users by reading a remote `yaml` file stored
        online. SPS will fetch the content of this file and translate it to different
        notes you can see here. So you do not need to re-deploy the app every time
        there is a new notification.
        1. You can customize your own notifications by
           using [this file as template](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/systemPipeR/systemPipeShiny/master/inst/remote_resource/notifications.yaml).
        2. After the modification, place this file in public accessible location, like
           Github, do not inlcude this file in app deployment.
        3. During app deployment, indicate the URL of this file in `global.R`
           file, `note_url:` option.

Template details

Most entries are easy-to-understand. Here are some key points.

Indentation

Indentation is very important in a yaml file. In the template, we use 4 spaces as 1 level of indentation.

Notification start and end

Always start with a - note: to define a notification item. After you finish typing the message body, leave at least one line blank before starting another notification.

type

general: Use this type to create a general notification. It will ignore pkg_name and version information.

package: A notification that is related to a package updates. This type of note will first check if the user has installed the package (single one) with a version that is higher than the specified version number in pkg_name and version entries. If so, the notification will not be displayed. If not the user will see the notification before expiration date.

expire

The expire decides how long to show users the notification. If current date has passed the date in expire, the notification will not be displayed.

Message body

Use | to start a new line and put the markdown format text body in the next indentation level.

Last modified 2023-10-02 : rebuild no_render (acf0bd05)