Update/delete notifications

[blacklight]

A similar issue was open a while ago, but it didn't get traction for some reason.

The ability to update notifications is so far the only feature that forces me to still use AutoNotification and the Tasker environment instead of ntfy.

I have a multi-host and multi-room music setup, and whenever a new track is playing I receive an actionable notification that allows me to easily control the playback.

AutoNotification allows editing a notification given its ID (even a total overwrite/replace is fine, so we don't have to mess with the complexity of partial updates). And that's exactly the feature I need: if every music device created a new notification for each track that is played the notification bar will quickly get crammed, especially if there is no programmatic way to dismiss stale notifications. Notifications that report a progress status are another quite interesting use case that isn't possible right now.

[binwiederhier]

I absolutely love the idea of updating notifications, and I've attempted to implement it twice. It's a little tricky to implement but doable.

The reason it didn't get traction was because I hated the API I came up with, and on Discord nobody had any better ideas. I want the API to be simple and ideally the request to update a message is the same that it is to initially publish it. That's what's tricky about it.

Related:
#259
#254
#187
#43

[binwiederhier]

There's also #44 for progress. That is trivial to implement once messages can be updated.

[blacklight]

I want the API to be simple and ideally the request to update a message is the same that it is to initially publish it.

Something like POST/PUT without an id to create a notification and PUT with an id to upsert? id could then be passed either on the query string or the JSON payload.

[KawaiiZapic]

It's great to have this feature.
we can set an id(or type) for a message, and replace the old message when new message come if id is same.

Or can we support conversation type message on Android?

It is useful to push IRC message to phone in a website only IRC channel.

[mrherman]

For the API, we could consider something similar to Home Assistants companion app's notification replace/clear system. https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/notifications/notifications-basic/#replacing For that, the user/client provides a tag/id name for the notifications. On the receiver side, if no notification with that tag exists then it creates it, otherwise it deletes/replaces it. It is up to the user to make the tag super unique or generic depending on their use case.

Just to add, I would really like this feature too. I pop up an image of the outdoor cam when doorbell is rang, but it is only relevant until no motion is detected (for me to decide to answer it or not), after that I would like to clear the notification. Also, sticky notification (if we get them) that has some data that is periodically updated, I can update the notification when the data is changed.

[julianlam]

Another +1 for this suggestion, if I may 😄

We would use this in NodeBB for replacing notifications with updated text or to remove stale notifications. For example, a notification that a post needs review is no longer relevant if another admin has approved/denied it, and so the notification automatically gets rescinded in NodeBB.

We also replace notification text saying "X has posted a reply" to some variants like "X and 2 others have posted a reply", etc.

We use nid, similar to @blacklight's suggestion. We also use mergeId to combine notifications, but I wouldn't expect that one to land in ntfy any time soon, if ever 😉

[courtarro]

+1

As discussed in previous comments, it seems like the standard in other notification architectures is to use an optional ID when creating a notification. If the ID of a new notification matches a previous notification, the previous notification is replaced with the new one. If we support an integer ID, the clients should be able to handle them also. If there is an errant client that can't handle it, it would just show all of the notifications without replacement.

• Android - takes an int natively, so we can just pass it onto the OS
• iOS - this is a string, but an int converted to a string should be fine
• Web - this uses the "tag" field, but you could put the ID there

Is there a reason we can't use an integer id field for this? What are the API concerns you have, @binwiederhier?

Edit: I see that there's an internal id field already that is a random string. So then let's call ours external_id and it's an int.

[spraot]

If this feature is implemented I would happily switch over from Pushover.

[chovyy]

I would realy love to have this. I often send status updates from my home automation, and it is quite annoying to have this stack of messages on the same issue.

[pnxs]

I also really like this feature, I tried to understand what you hate about your API for updating messages but I had trouble to find what the API really looks like (I looked into #259 and #187).
You said, you want the API "to be simple and ideally the request to update a message is the same that it is to initially publish it.". This makes sense to me, because removing the message is more like adding the information, that the message is remove to an existing message. In some cases one would like to add an information or timestamp why this message was deleted.
Naively spoken: I just expect the message id to be returned from the POST, which enabled the publisher to update it's message if it want to.
To update the message it just do the same as publishing it originally, with the difference, that the message id is added to the POST.

E.g.:

First POST:

POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: ntfy.sh

{
    "topic": "myhome",
    "message": "Garage door has been open for 15 minutes. Close it?",
    "actions": [
      {
        "action": "http",
        "label": "Close door",
        "url": "https://api.mygarage.lan/",
        "method": "PUT",
        "headers": {
          "Authorization": "Bearer zAzsx1sk.."
        },
        "body": "{\"action\": \"close\"}"
      }
    ]
}

The Post will return the message Id "cdssFSfwt4fw"

Update of the message:

POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: ntfy.sh

{
    "topic": "myhome",
    "message": "Garage door has been open for 20 minutes. Close it?",
    "actions": [
      {
        "action": "http",
        "label": "Close door",
        "url": "https://api.mygarage.lan/",
        "method": "PUT",
        "headers": {
          "Authorization": "Bearer zAzsx1sk.."
        },
        "body": "{\"action\": \"close\"}"
      }
    ]
}

Remove the message:

POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: ntfy.sh

{
    "topic": "myhome",
    "id": "cdssFSfwt4fw",
    "message": "Garage door was open for 25 minutes.",
    "removed": "<timestamp>"
}

The presenting application has not to be aware of updating messages. In the simplest case, every message is shown consecutively. But if the presenting application is aware it could replace the message on it's display, change colors or do whatever. Maybe also show a log of recently remove messages.

What do you think @binwiederhier ?