Send notification if item in pantry reaches best-before date

[Afebriwyn]

Hello, and thank you so much for this amazing app!

Our family has been using Yuvomi for two weeks now, and as you’d expect, as we’ve been using it, we’ve come up with some ideas.
So here’s a request from my daughter:
It would be great if Yuvomi sent a notification x days before a food item in the pantry reaches its best-before date.

Furthermore, it would be great if there were a configurable set of rules for notifications, something like, “When a date is reached in Module X, send a notification to family members A and B.”

Thanks & best regards!

[ulsklyc]

Thank you - and please pass on to your daughter that her request lands on a path that is already half built.

Reminders are not tied to tasks and events any more. The entity_type column has been widened twice already, each time for exactly this kind of request:

('task', 'event')
('task', 'event', 'subscription')
('task', 'event', 'subscription', 'inventory_item', 'inventory_tracked_date')

Inventory items notify ahead of a warranty running out; tracked dates do the same for any date you put on an item. Pantry has had an expiry date since #596 and is simply not in that list. So "notify x days before the best-before date" is the same mechanism a fourth time, not a new one - which also means the "x days" offset you ask for already exists and is per reminder.

Your second idea is the larger one, and I would keep the two apart. A configurable rule engine ("when a date is reached in module X, notify A and B") is a different kind of feature: it needs a rule store, a UI to express conditions, and it would sit above every module rather than inside one. It is a reasonable direction, but it should not block the pantry case, which is a small extension of something that already works.

Staying open for both, with the pantry half as the near-term one.

[Afebriwyn]

Hello, and thank you very much for your reply!
That all sounds really good and promising—we're already looking forward to the new features!
Thank you very much for your work!

[ulsklyc]

The pantry half is built - #870 is open.

It turned out to be exactly the fourth application of the existing mechanism, as expected: pantry_item joins the list of reminder origins, and a best-before date now announces itself seven days ahead. Three things about it are worth stating, because two of them were not obvious when I answered above:

The lead time is not a new setting. It is the same seven days that already turn the row yellow with "expiring soon". Two numbers for the same question would mean the notification arrives on a day when nothing is marked in the list, and neither day would be explainable. A per-item lead time - which is what inventory deadlines carry - is the wrong shape here: a pantry is bulk goods, and a field nobody maintains per yoghurt is a half-filled field.

Fresh produce is the main case, not the exception, and it nearly broke the feature. Milk, yoghurt and salad almost always have fewer than seven days left when you buy them - their lead time has already passed by the time you enter them. The inventory rule discards such a reminder outright, which is right there (it only happens for a back-dated old appliance) and would have made this feature silent for precisely the items it exists for. Entering an item now pulls the reminder forward to the next morning instead of dropping it.

Stock that was already on the shelf gets picked up too. Your untouched jar at the back was the case in the request, and it would never have been saved through the app, so the notification run reconciles the whole pantry rather than waiting for someone to touch each item.

Your second idea - a configurable rule engine across modules - stays a separate thread, unchanged from what I wrote above. Please pass on the thanks to your daughter; her request was the one that turned out to be a single missing line.