Render your notifications on multiple platforms by specifying notification types.
NotificationRenderer works with Rails 5 onwards. You can add it to your Gemfile with:
gem 'notification-renderer'And then execute:
$ bundle
Or install it yourself as:
$ gem install notification-renderer
Now run the generator:
$ rails g notification_renderer:install
To wrap things up, migrate the changes to your database:
$ rails db:migrate
NotificationRenderer uses templates to render your notifications.
The type of a notification determines which template gets utilized for rendering. Each notification type has multiple templates each of which responsible for rendering a notification in another scenario. The default template for a given type is index.
This gem comes with a generator to make adding new types a whole lot easier. Run in your terminal:
$ rails g notification_renderer:type -t notification
This will create the following structure in your application:
viewsnotificationsnotification_index.html.erb
You can also customize the generated templates (renderers):
$ rails g notification_renderer:type -t notification -r index feed
This command will also create a custom renderer called feed for the notification type notification:
viewsnotificationsnotification_feed.html.erb_index.html.erb
You are able to specify the type of a Notification record:
notification = Notification.create(target: User.first, object: Recipe.first, type: 'notification')Note: The type attribute of any new Notification record will default to the default_type configuration.
You can also scope records by their type:
# Return records with `'notification'` as type
Notification.notification_type
# Return records with `'follow'` as type
Notification.follow_typeIn your renderers you can access the Notification record through the notification variable. This is how a renderer could look like:
<%= notification.target.name %> commented on <%= notification.object.article.title %>.NotificationRenderer introduces some view helpers to assist you in embedding notifications.
render_notification renders a single Notification record:
<%= render_notification Notification.first %>Rendering a notification will set its read attribute to true. This behavior can be configured.
You can also specify a renderer. It defaults to 'index'.
<%= render_notification Notification.first, 'feed' %>render_notifications takes an ActiveRecord array of Notification records and renders each of them in order:
<%= render_notifications Notification.all %>You can also specify a renderer. It defaults to 'index'.
<%= render_notifications Notification.all, 'feed' %>It wraps the rendered notifications in a div:
<div class="notification-renderer notifications">
<!-- ... -->
</div>You can group any ActiveRecord array of Notification records by an attribute value:
Notification.all.grouping(['object.article'])
Notification.all.grouping(['object.article', 'metadata[:title]'])Note: Notifications will be grouped in order.
When rendering notifications you often want to group them by the object they belong to. This is how to group notifications by the associated object:
<%= render_notifications_grouped Notification.all, ['object'], renderer: 'feed' %>You can also group notifications by nested attributes:
<%= render_notifications_grouped Notification.all, ['object.article'] %>
<%= render_notifications_grouped Notification.all, ['metadata[:title]'] %>It is also possible to group notifications for just one object:
<%= render_notifications_grouped Notification.where(object_id: 1, object_type: 'Comment'), ['object'] %>This will render the last notification for every group and pass the attributes value grouped by to your renderer:
<!-- View -->
<%= render_notifications_grouped Notification.notification_type, ['object.article'] %><!-- Renderer -->
<% if notification_grouped? %>
<%= notification.target.name %> and <%= (notifications.size - 1).to_s %> others commented on <%= attributes['object.article'].title %>.
<% else %>
<%= notification.target.name %> commented on <%= notification.object.article.title %>.
<% end %>Grouping makes the following two methods available in your renderer:
attributes Hash of attributes grouped by and their values.
notifications The ActiveRecord array of notifications including the currently rendered notification.
You may check whether a template is being used for grouping by using the notification_grouped? helper method.
It is common, if rendering multiple notification types at once, to group the notifications by their type:
<%= render_notifications_grouped Notification.all, ['object.article'], group_by_type: true %>This is identical to the following:
<%= render_notifications_grouped Notification.all, [:type, 'object.article'] %>It is also often required to group notifications by their date of creation:
<%= render_notifications_grouped Notification.all, ['object.article'], group_by_date: :month %>This is identical to the following:
<%= render_notifications_grouped Notification.all, ['created_at.beginning_of_month', 'object.article'] %>Accepted values are:
:minute:hour:day:week:month:year
Note: If used together with group_by_type, notifications will be grouped first by creation date and then by :type.
You can configure NotificationRenderer by passing a block to configure. This can be done in config/initializers/notification-renderer.rb:
NotificationRenderer.configure do |config|
config.default_type = 'notification'
enddefault_type Choose your default notification type. Takes a string. Defaults to 'notification'.
default_renderer Choose your default renderer. Takes a string. Defaults to 'index'.
auto_read Automatically mark rendered notifications as read. Takes a boolean. Defaults to true.
We use GitHub projects to coordinate the work on this project.
To propose your ideas, initiate the discussion by adding a new issue.
We hope that you will consider contributing to NotificationRenderer. Please read this short overview for some information about how to get started:
Learn more about contributing to this repository, Code of Conduct
NotificationRenderer follows Semantic Versioning 2.0 as defined at http://semver.org.