Getting the target user for notification webhook events

Dev
1

I see that webhooks now support notifications which is fantastic. Something we really need. However the payload is missing one critical piece of information - the user the notification is for. In this example payload we can see the author of the post that triggered the notification, but not the user that should receive the notification.

{
  "notification": {
    "id": 119,
    "notification_type": 9,
    "read": false,
    "created_at": "2019-09-18T13:42:21.248Z",
    "post_number": 1,
    "topic_id": 75,
    "fancy_title": "Phallguy should get a notice about this",
    "slug": "phallguy-should-get-a-notice-about-this",
    "data": {
      "topic_title": "Phallguy should get a notice about this",
      "original_post_id": 111,
      "original_post_type": 1,
      "original_username": "Paul_Alexander",
      "revision_number": null,
      "display_username": "Paul_Alexander"
    }
  }
}

I’ve looked to see if there’s an API to get the target user from notification id but haven’t found anything documented. Is there a way we can get the target username/id in the notification payload?

For context, we are trying to consolidate notifications from multiple systems into a single experience for our users.

1 Like
2

@Falco or @blake do you have any thoughts on how I can figure out which user a notification is for when received through the new notification webhook?

3

Just looked at this briefly to see if there was a quick answer, and you are right, it does not look like we have a get api endpoint for fetching an individual notification by id, but that wouldn’t be very efficient to call every time anyways.

Most likely this will require a code change to the notification serializer to include the user_id/username inside of the notification payload, so that a separate api request wouldn’t be necessary.

2 Likes
4

We’re using the hosted service at the moment otherwise I’d build my own plugin. Would you folks consider adding the user id/username to then notification payload in the webhook?

5

Did you check the headers?

6

I did - hoping to find some extra meta data in there but didn’t find anything user specific.

Request URL: https://XXX
Request method: POST
Accept: */*
Connection: close
Content-Length: 420
Content-Type: application/json
Host: XXX
User-Agent: Discourse/2.4.0.beta4
X-Discourse-Instance: https://XXX
X-Discourse-Event-Id: 11
X-Discourse-Event-Type: notification
X-Discourse-Event: notification_created
X-Discourse-Event-Signature: sha256=XXX
7

Checking in to see if you folks have any thoughts/updates. The notification webhook without a target user isn’t really of much use.

8

Hey guys have you had a chance to review the issue? Is there any hope that we can get the target user id in the notification event?

9

I’ve created a pr that will add the user_id to the notification webhook json payload:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/8195

4 Likes
10

Hi @blake, would it be possible to also add the user external_id? We work with Discourse’s SSO and we don’t really have the discourse user ids in our system.

1 Like
11

Hi Albert!

I think that is a good idea to have and I’ve created commit that will add the external_id of the user if sso is enabled.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/a900c99993aa029230b57d9fd0d96365e1579a21

Hopefully that helps! It will be added to your site next time it is deployed, which should be sometime this week.

3 Likes
12

Wow, that was fast! Thanks a lot, much appreciated :smiley: Do you know what’s the aprox ETA for those changes to make it to the hosted Discourse servers?

1 Like
13

Oh nevermind, didn’t read the last sentence :sweat_smile:. Thanks again!!