django-anonymous-notification 1.2.1

Creating Notice Types

You need to call create_notice_type(label, display, description) once to create the notice types for your application in the database. label is just the internal shortname that will be used for the type, display is what the user will see as the name of the notification type and description is a short description.

For example:

notification.create_notice_type("friends_invite", "Invitation Received", "you have received an invitation")

One good way to automatically do this notice type creation is in a management.py file for your app, attached to the syncdb signal. Here is an example:

from django.conf import settings
from django.db.models import signals
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_noop as _

if "notification" in settings.INSTALLED_APPS:
    from notification import models as notification

    def create_notice_types(app, created_models, verbosity, **kwargs):
        notification.create_notice_type("friends_invite", _("Invitation Received"), _("you have received an invitation"))
        notification.create_notice_type("friends_accept", _("Acceptance Received"), _("an invitation you sent has been accepted"))

    signals.post_syncdb.connect(create_notice_types, sender=notification)
else:
    print "Skipping creation of NoticeTypes as notification app not found"

Notice that the code is wrapped in a conditional clause so if django-notification is not installed, your app will proceed anyway.

Note that the display and description arguments are marked for translation by using ugettext_noop. That will enable you to use Django’s makemessages management command and use django-notification’s i18n capabilities.

Notification templates

There are four different templates that can be written to for the actual content of the notices:

• short.txt is a very short, text-only version of the notice (suitable for things like email subjects)

• full.txt is a longer, text-only version of the notice (suitable for things like email bodies)

• notice.html is a short, html version of the notice, displayed in a user’s notice list on the website

• full.html is a long, html version of the notice (not currently used for anything)

Each of these should be put in a directory on the template path called notification/<notice_type_label>/<template_name>. If any of these are missing, a default would be used. In practice, notice.html and full.txt should be provided at a minimum.

For example, notification/friends_invite/notice.html might contain:

{% load i18n %}{% url invitations as invitation_page %}{% url profile_detail username=invitation.from_user.username as user_url %}
{% blocktrans with invitation.from_user as invitation_from_user %}<a href="{{ user_url }}">{{ invitation_from_user }}</a> has requested to add you as a friend (see <a href="{{ invitation_page }}">invitations</a>){% endblocktrans %}

and notification/friends/full.txt might contain:

{% load i18n %}{% url invitations as invitation_page %}{% blocktrans with invitation.from_user as invitation_from_user %}{{ invitation_from_user }} has requested to add you as a friend. You can accept their invitation at:

http://{{ current_site }}{{ invitation_page }}
{% endblocktrans %}

The context variables are provided when sending the notification.

send_now vs. queue vs. send

Lets first break down what each does.

Optional notification support

In case you want to use django-notification in your reusable app, you can wrap the import of django-notification in a conditional clause that tests if it’s installed before sending a notice. As a result your app or project still functions without notification.

For example:

from django.conf import settings

if "notification" in settings.INSTALLED_APPS:
    from notification import models as notification
else:
    notification = None

and then, later:

if notification:
    notification.send([to_user], "friends_invite", {"from_user": from_user})