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Read more about the article Implementing Notifications in Open Event Server

Implementing Notifications in Open Event Server

In FOSSASIA’s Open Event Server project, along with emails, almost all actions have necessary user notifications as well. So, when a new session is created or a session is accepted by the event organisers, along with the email, a user notification is also sent. Though showing the user notification is mainly implemented in the frontend site but the content to be shown and on which action to show is strictly decided by the server project. A notification essentially helps an user to get the necessary information while staying in the platform itself and not needing to go to check his/her email for every action he performs. So unlike email which acts as a backup for the informations, notification is more of an instant thing. The API The Notifications API is mostly like all other JSON API endpoints in the open event project. However in Notifications API we do not allow any to send a POST request. The admin of the server is able to send a GET a request to view all the notifications that are there in the system while a user can only view his/her notification. As of PATCH we allow only the user to edit his/her notification to mark it as read or not read. Following is the schema for the API: class NotificationSchema(Schema): """ API Schema for Notification Model """ class Meta: """ Meta class for Notification API schema """ type_ = 'notification' self_view = 'v1.notification_detail' self_view_kwargs = {'id': '<id>'} self_view_many = 'v1.microlocation_list_post' inflect = dasherize id = fields.Str(dump_only=True) title = fields.Str(allow_none=True, dump_only=True) message = fields.Str(allow_none=True, dump_only=True) received_at = fields.DateTime(dump_only=True) accept = fields.Str(allow_none=True, dump_only=True) is_read = fields.Boolean() user = Relationship(attribute='user', self_view='v1.notification_user', self_view_kwargs={'id': '<id>'}, related_view='v1.user_detail', related_view_kwargs={'notification_id': '<id>'}, schema='UserSchema', type_='user' ) The main things that are shown in the notification from the frontend are the title and message. The title is the text that is shown without expanding the entire notification that gives an overview about the message in case you don’t want to read the entire message. The message however provides the entire detail that is associated with the action performed. The user relationship stores which user the particular notification is related with. It is a one-to-one relationship where one notification can only belong to one user. However one user can have multiple notifications. Another important attribute is the is_read attribute. This is the only attribute that is allowed to be changed. By default, when we make an entry in the database, is_read is set to FALSE. Once an user has read the notification, a request is sent from the frontend to change is_read to TRUE. The different actions for which we send notification are stored in the models/notification.py file as global variables. USER_CHANGE_EMAIL = "User email"' NEW_SESSION = 'New Session Proposal' PASSWORD_CHANGE = 'Change Password' EVENT_ROLE = 'Event Role Invitation' TICKET_PURCHASED = 'Ticket(s) Purchased' TICKET_PURCHASED_ATTENDEE = 'Ticket(s) purchased to Attendee ' EVENT_EXPORTED = 'Event Exported' EVENT_EXPORT_FAIL = 'Event Export Failed' EVENT_IMPORTED = 'Event Imported' HTML Templates The notification title and message that is stored in the…

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Read more about the article Implement Email in Open Event Server

Implement Email in Open Event Server

In FOSSASIA’s Open Event Server project, we send out emails when various different actions are performed using the API. For example, when a new user is created, he/she receives an email welcoming him to the server as well as an email verification email. Users get role invites from event organisers in the form of emails, when someone buys a ticket he/she gets a PDF link to the ticket as email. So as you can understand all the important informations that are necessary to be notified to the user are sent as an email to the user and sometimes to the organizer as well. In FOSSASIA, we use sendgrid’s API or an SMTP server depending on the admin settings for sending emails. You can read more about how we use sendgrid’s API to send emails in FOSSASIA here. Now let’s dive into the modules that we have for sending the emails. The three main parts in the entire email sending are: Model - Storing the Various Actions Templates - Storing the HTML templates for the emails Email Functions - Individual functions for various different actions Let’s go through each of these modules one by one. Model USER_REGISTER = 'User Registration' USER_CONFIRM = 'User Confirmation' USER_CHANGE_EMAIL = "User email" INVITE_PAPERS = 'Invitation For Papers' NEXT_EVENT = 'Next Event' NEW_SESSION = 'New Session Proposal' PASSWORD_RESET = 'Reset Password' PASSWORD_CHANGE = 'Change Password' EVENT_ROLE = 'Event Role Invitation' SESSION_ACCEPT_REJECT = 'Session Accept or Reject' SESSION_SCHEDULE = 'Session Schedule Change' EVENT_PUBLISH = 'Event Published' AFTER_EVENT = 'After Event' USER_REGISTER_WITH_PASSWORD = 'User Registration during Payment' TICKET_PURCHASED = 'Ticket(s) Purchased' In the Model file, named as mail.py, we firstly declare the various different actions for which we send the emails out. These actions are globally used as the keys in the other modules of the email sending service. Here, we define global variables with the name of the action as strings in them. These are all constant variables, which means that there value remains throughout and never changes. For example, USER_REGISTER has the value ‘User Registration’, which essentially means that anything related to the USER_REGISTER key is executed when the User Registration action occurs. Or in other words, whenever an user registers into the system by signing up or creating a new user through the API, he/she receives the corresponding emails. Apart from this, we have the model class which defines a table in the database. We use this model class to store the actions performed while sending emails in the database. So we store the action, the time at which the email was sent, the recipient and the sender. That way we have a record about all the emails that were sent out via our server. class Mail(db.Model): __tablename__ = 'mails' id = db.Column(db.Integer, primary_key=True) recipient = db.Column(db.String) time = db.Column(db.DateTime(timezone=True)) action = db.Column(db.String) subject = db.Column(db.String) message = db.Column(db.String) def __init__(self, recipient=None, time=None, action=None, subject=None, message=None): self.recipient = recipient self.time = time if self.time is None: self.time = datetime.now(pytz.utc) self.action = action self.subject = subject…

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