Timed Push Notification

[ulliholtgrave]

Motivation

Users want to write push notifications in advance, but not send them directly. Instead, a time should be defined at which the notification should be sent.

Proposed Solution

Add a timing box to the content form for Push Notifications where a time can be defined at which the notification should be send to the user. We can probably copy a lot from the event form and use some kind of in-built job to send the Push Notifications at the desired time.

As a initial step we won't a recurring feature and stick with a simple time step.

User Story

• As a CMS-User I want to define a time for a push notification so that I don't have be at the computer when a notification is supposed to be send to the user.

Additional Context

Possible timing component: https://django-extensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/jobs_scheduling.html

Design Requirements

[PeterNerlich]

This sounds like effort: high to me, as well as requiring some designs. As soon as I as a user can schedule content to be published/sent at a later time, I also want to have a clear overview of any currently scheduled messages, repeatedly change content, schedule time etc. and also get feedback about whether scheduled messages were actually sent on time and with what content because I tried to change something again last minute so did I make it or not???
So, I'd expect this to require a whole new section in the CMS frontend along with the backend machinery to efficiently manage all these scheduled notifications.

[timobrembeck]

This sounds like effort: high to me,

Agreed.

Possible timing component: https://django-extensions.readthedocs.io/en/latest/jobs_scheduling.html

This doesn't help us very much, since it only runs jobs at a given schedule, not at a given point in time. So this extension essentially provides cron jobs, which we can also run on the server natively. We could e.g. define a management command that sends out all timed push notification of the current time window and execute this all 5 minutes or so (depending on how fine graded we allow them to sent the notifications... probably hourly or half-hourly would also be ok)

If we want to go with a python-only solution, we could also have a look at https://apscheduler.readthedocs.io/, but this definitely adds quite a lot of dependency code... and I'm not sure if running a permanent scheduler in the background is really justified for the (probably very limited) usage of timed push notifications...