Forwarding of notifications

[ds-crehm]

During work on #436 I noticed that there is an open ticket about the possibility to forward notifications: eclipse-tractusx/sig-release#385
If forwarding notifications will be added as a feature, it's important to show this information consistently to users. That's also part of the issue 436, so I would like to discuss ideas on how forwarding will be implemented.

It should be possible to forward a notification multiple times to multiple partners. This makes it very difficult to keep track of all of the information consistently within a single notification. My idea is to create duplicates of the initial notification each time it is forwarded. The duplicated notification can then be handled independently and contain all relevant information. The initial notification will remain in the state "Forwarded".
I created a state diagram to illustrate this process:

Maybe this helps with the implementation of eclipse-tractusx/sig-release#385
If you have other ideas or feedback, please let me know.

Thank you!

[felixschmidtcofinity]

I agree that there should be duplicates of the original request. In fact, I think it is mandatory, because in some cases it might be necessary to share different information.

Just a comment on your visualisation. I would suggest that we don't synchronise the status "Forwarded", or at least let the user decide if that's what they want. As far as I understand, there might be cases where a supplier doesn't want to inform his customer if the notification is forwarded.

[ds-crehm]

Understandable. I haven't thought about that.
I think making it a choice makes it too complicated and might be confusing and I can't think of a proper solution for company B to switch the status then. (A button "Share Forwarded status"? Or a user setting? Both seem strange to me.)
In that case I would not implement a Forwarded status at all. So when a company forwards a notification, the state will stay in Acknowledged for both sender and receiver. While transparency is not optimal, at least it will stay consistent and simple.
What do you think?

[felixschmidtcofinity]

Yes, i agree, let it keep simple.

[ds-crehm]

I'll update the concept and close this discussion.