[IDEA] Extend notifications mechanism to make notifications more flexible.

[saqimtiaz]

It would be desirable to extend the notifications mechanism with the following features:

• the ability to show multiple notifications at once, i.e. stacking notifications
• customizable durations for notifications
• notifications that must be explicitly dismissed by the user
• notifications that can be collapsed/minimized (for example progress bars)
• pass any additional parameters to tm-notify as variables to the notification (see also #2403)

The simple-notify library might provide some UI inspiration.

---

References:

• Discussion on Talk about using simple-notify in the core by @oeyoews

[saqimtiaz]

It would also be interesting to explore implementing the notifications sub-system with wikitext:

• Represent the notifications area as a list widget in the root or page template that displays tagged tiddlers
• Remove the handling of the tm-notify message from $navigator and instead use an instance of the $messagecatcher widget.
• Create temp tiddlers with the appropriate tag to represent each notification including metadata about how they should be displayed (self-closing or not for example)
• explore using the same technique and mechanism to refactor the alerts sub-system

Considerations:

• refresh handling - making notification state persistent across refresh cycles
• self-closing notifications - how to reproduce the current behaviour with wikitext, where notifications are removed after a certain amount of time

[Jermolene]

Thank you for the summary @saqimtiaz. I'd add that we should make it possible to issue an alert without first creating a tiddler (one would still be created in the background of course). Something like:

<$action-sendmessage $type="tm-modal" text={{{ ... }}}/>

One minor point is that we're a bit constrained by the fact that the current implementation uses all the provided key/value pairs. So we can't use something as simple as "text" in case it was already in use. But using our tv- prefix should be sufficient:

<$action-sendmessage $type="tm-modal" tv-text={{{ ... }}}/>

[oeyoews]

I just tried to rewrite the simple-notify plugin for those cases where adding a tiddler is not required. Looks like it's working well so far

plugins demo

// widget
<$notify title="Test simple notify" />

// wikitext
<$button>
    <$action-sendmessage $message="om-notify" title="Just test simple notify" autoclose="false" />
    om-notify
</$button>

// For js developers, you can use `om-notify` to instead of `tm-notify`
this.parentWidget.dispatchEvent({
  type: 'om-notify',
  paramObject: options
});