Why the heck is there no notify.persistent_notification service?

Month of "What the heck?!"
#1

I guess the real question here is why doesn’t persistent_notification leverage the notify platform like all other notification integrations? Seems like it would be great for consistency, usability and approachability to not have persistent_notifications be so strange, especially considering they are likely the first type of notification HA users encounter.

Also would like to be able to create alerts which create persistent notifications as their way of conveying their message. That won’t work right now since persistent notifications are not actually a notification integration and there is no notify.persistent_notification service.

#2

As a workaround you use the RESTful notification platform and the HA REST API, as in this post:

You do need to create a long-lived access token for it to work, but it works quite well.

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#3

Nice! I didn’t think about that. Going to bookmark that for later.

#4

Thanks for advertising that useful tip. I just tried it and it works like a charm.

#5

This is also true for mobile notifications.

#6

persistent_notification.create is the service isn’t it?

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#7

There’s already a notify service for mobile notifications though. I have both IOS and Android apps hooked up to my HA and I see notify services for both types of devices.

#8

Yes this exists. My issue with it is that its not actually built on the notify platform which creates some issues. In addition to being confusing, challenges I have personally encountered with this are:

  1. Cannot create an alert which creates a persistent notification for its message
  2. Cannot create a notify group that also creates a persistent notification
  3. Cannot create an automation which takes in the name of a notification service to use and wants persistent notification to be an option since its service name and interface are different

There’s probably more. And fwiw that workaround @Steven_Rollason listed is a great solution to this and I will leverage it. But still I think its a WTH moment that persistent notifications (the only OOTB notification service available without configuring additional integrations) is not actually a notification service and behaves totally differently.

2 Likes
#9

Alerts and persistent notifications seem to me to have a lot of WTH issues. From my limited understanding @CentralCommand captures a number of them, but I think there are more.

I will try the work around above, but doesn’t it seem like a kludge to have an internal function like alerting/notification dependent on an http transaction within the same code? Of course there is the issue that the notification which could be critical is dependent on the access code working.

#10
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#11

This is great!
Now that it is implemented and released in 0.117, we can do this:

notify:
  - name: My Notifications Group
    platform: group
    services:
      - service: persistent_notification   # This is the new feature in 0.117!
      - service: mobile_app_oneplus   # Some other notification service

And starting with 0.117 we can also add a Text-to-Speech (TTS) notifications to groups and do this:

notify:
  - platform: tts
    name: say_in_the_living_room
    tts_service: tts.google_translate_say        # assuming you have tts defined (default)
    media_player: media_player.living_room_home_mini
  - name: My Notifications Group
    platform: group
    services:
      - service: persistent_notification
      - service: mobile_app_oneplus
      - service: say_in_the_living_room    #  Cool!
1 Like