Using liferay dockbar notifications - liferay

Question

I’d like to use the liferay notification feature following the tutorial http://www.codeyouneed.com/liferay-custom-notifications/. And as many people before, I succeeded in increasing the number of notifications, but the notification message is not displayed.
I tried to check by adding log-output whether the methods (getBody, getLink, …) of the UserNotificationHandler are called, and they are not called at all, not even the constructor of the UserNotificationHandler is called.
So I conclude that my notification is written to the database, but my UserNotificationHandler class is not found.
In my project, I have put the
user-notification-definitions into
project/src/main/resources.
They look like:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE user-notification-definitions PUBLIC "-//Liferay//DTD User Notification Definitions 6.2.0//EN" "http://www.liferay.com/dtd/liferay-user-notification-definitions_6_2_0.dtd">
<user-notification-definitions>
<definition>
<notification-type>${com.myproject.portal.notifications.UserNotificationHandler.PORTLET_ID}</notification-type>
<description>receive-a-notification-when-triggered</description>
<delivery-type>
<name>email</name>
<type>${com.liferay.portal.model.UserNotificationDeliveryConstants.TYPE_EMAIL}</type>
<default>true</default>
<modifiable>true</modifiable>
</delivery-type>
<delivery-type>
<name>website</name>
<type>${com.liferay.portal.model.UserNotificationDeliveryConstants.TYPE_WEBSITE}</type>
<default>true</default>
<modifiable>true</modifiable>
</delivery-type>
</definition>
</user-notification-definitions>
The liferay-portlet.xml is in
project/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF.
And the UserNotificationHandler in
project/src/main/java/com/myproject/portal/notifications
in the package com.myproject.portal.notifications.
I wrote something like that into the liferay-portlet.xml:
<portlet-name>example</portlet-name>
<icon>/icon.png</icon>
<user-notification-definitions>
user-notification-definitions.xml
</user-notification-definitions>
<user-notification-handler-class>
com.myproject.portal.notifications.UserNotificationHandler
</user-notification-handler-class>
</portlet>
This is my UserNotificationHandlerClass (so far, I am just trying to get it work before adding the actual content):
package com.myproject.portal.notifications;
import ...//all necessary imports
public class UserNotificationHandler extends
BaseUserNotificationHandler {
public static final String PORTLET_ID = "example_WAR_myprojectportlet";
private static final Logger log = Logger.getLogger(UserNotificationHandler.class);
public UserNotificationHandler() {
log.info("UserNotificationHandler - Constructor");
setPortletId(UserNotificationHandler.PORTLET_ID);
}
#Override
protected String getBody(UserNotificationEvent userNotificationEvent,
ServiceContext serviceContext) throws Exception {
log.info("in getBody");
return "";
}
#Override
protected String getLink(UserNotificationEvent userNotificationEvent,
ServiceContext serviceContext) throws Exception {
log.info("in getLink");
return "";
}
protected String getBodyTemplate() throws Exception {
log.info("in getBodyTemplate");
return "";
}
}
I trigger the notification in my portlet like this:
ServiceContext serviceContext = ServiceContextFactory.getInstance(request);
JSONObject payloadJSON = JSONFactoryUtil.createJSONObject();
payloadJSON.put("userId", userId);
payloadJSON.put("yourCustomEntityId", 12345);
payloadJSON.put("additionalData", "success");
UserNotificationEventLocalServiceUtil.addUserNotificationEvent(userId,
UserNotificationHandler.PORTLET_ID,
(new Date()).getTime(),
userId,
payloadJSON.toString(),
false,
serviceContext);
What is the problem here?

Answer 1

Do you literally have public static final String PORTLET_ID = "myportlet"; in your code? If so, note the extra information in the tutorial that you link:
NB Important Information: The com.example.notifications.ExampleUserNotificationHandler.PORTLET_ID string that you use as your notification type has to match an actual portlet ID. It doesn’t actually need to be YOUR portlet ID but that would be the right thing to have there. The reason being that Notifications display portlet uses it to display a small portlet icon next to your notification to help the user identify the source of the notification. Providing a bad Portlet ID or something like null leads to a hard-to-trace NullPointerException in the JSP. Took me an hour to track it down.
Most likely the portlet ID looks rather like "example_WAR_myportlet", this indicates that it's deployed in a plugin named example.war and the portlet id (in portlet.xml) is myportlet. Try if it works then - Liferay might need to find the portlet in order to find, instanciate and use its NotificationHandler. (Note: This is currently a guess - I didn't try the full code posted)

Answer 2

In your liferay-portlet.xml you wrote
<user-notification-handler-class>
UserNotificationHandler
</user-notification-handler-class>
It should be:
<user-notification-handler-class>
com.myproject.portal.notifications.UserNotificationHandler
</user-notification-handler-class>
You should also check if this part is good
<user-notification-definitions>
user-notification-definitions.xml
</user-notification-definitions>
"user-notification-definitions.xml" file should be on WEB-INF/classes in the final WAR