Notification System

[hexylena]

Speaking of #2323

I would really like to be notified of histories being shared with me. My PI sometimes emails me saying "Didn't you get the history I shared with you?"

[jennaj]

@erasche agree, would be very useful!

[martenson]

email?

[hexylena]

@martenson sure. Email is fine. A toast notification if the user was logged in might also be nice.

If we're really feeling adventurous I'd love a persistent notification system. (Pretend the bottom are Histories / Data Libraries / Workflows instead of their icons)

[martenson]

I feel adventurous, but we need to fix the stuff we have before adding more... :/

[hexylena]

@martenson agreed :) Hence tagged friendliness/intermediate in case community wants to run with it.

[frederikcoppens]

notifications could be very useful indeed for all kind of things

[bgruening]

A few more use-cases here:

• GDPR/terms updated, please read this and accept our terms ....
• Admins redirect certain users/groups to special hosts/queues (needed for TIaaS)
• certain group has new data in the data library and the admin would like to inform them

[hexylena]

Apparently I opened this issue twice. Oops. #1023 was the original for a site-wide notification system. At least we know people want this :) I'll close the other one.

[bgruening]

More thoughts are also here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EA6RBqaWNBYYOYcUSxDoPPNQ4GaGbZCDwWWinLTpQNg

[mvdbeek]

This should be doable with a generalization of the history subscription work I'm doing currently.

[hexylena]

@bgruening that looks great, that seems about exactly what I had in mind. new table, everything. I'd love if role based and certain roles could have permissions to send notices!

[hexylena]

From @bgruening's document:

Use-cases:

• Galaxy deployers are changing the terms of use and need to inform all users. Optionally the deployers of Galaxy might want to know who accepts it.
• Cookie policy needs to be agreed on (https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cookie_statement).
• We lost data from a single user and want to inform them.
• A user did violate the Terms of use and we need to inform them.
• Downtime or other urgent notifications.
• New dataset was uploaded for you in this data library ...
• TIaaS notifications
• Subscribe to workflow updates
• Approaching storage quota
• New features added in Galaxy that we would like to make users aware

Implementation:

• Database gets a notification table
• Certain users/groups/roles can be assigned to one or more notifications
• Notifications-reactions from the user should be tracked.
• Notifications are in markdown, can contain links
• Notifications should be on-top of everything until a user reacts to them.
• Create notifications:
  • Notifications can be created via the Admin panel and a markdown editor with preview function.
  • API
  • Or an more advanced yaml file

Questions:

• Should this system be that flexible that special people can create notifications for special groups? Helena says yes, it should. But all of our stuff should be like that, using the giant RBAC system in galaxy. There should be some privileged roles (notification-creator, impersonator) and those roles can have those privileges.

[hexylena]

First steps toward this here: #12396 because I really need to get release notes to users.

I'd love to see the above system implemented, I agree with all of Björn's implementation suggestions.

[davelopez]

#15663 should cover the groundwork for this. Please open new issues with specific improvement suggestions and new extensions :)