NotificationSystem.md

Introduction

This document outlines a proposal to add a notification system to Tryton objects.

Rationale

Currently there is no way to warn users when specific events occur on object he is interested in. In consequence people often misuse the tab-domain feature to add filters to find the objects in a specific state in some sort of a pull strategy.

We do think that using a push strategy where a user subscribed to a record (or a type of records) is warned by the system when specific events occur.

The people customizing the ERP would define a set of interesting events and a text template to be used when this event happen. When the event occurs, the system sends an email (they are not revolutionnized yet!) to every user subscribed to the record that generated the event.

Implemenation idea

According to us, we can reuse the triggers in order to define the condition that are met by an interesting event.

Thanks to this idea we can design an Event model that would be something like this

class Event:
    trigger = fields.Many2One('ir.trigger', 'Trigger')
    template = fields.Text('Template')

The template property is the text that will be transmitted using the transport protocol ; using some templating engine like genshi is probably a good idea.

In order to be notification-aware a class have to inherit from a specific NotificationMixin. This mixin defines the set of method that will be used in order to compute the related template and to send the message to the concerned users.

Open question

It's still not clear how the Event object related to the trigger will be able to transmit the template information to the NotificationMixin.