WTH: is it so difficult to create actionable mobile notifications?

Month of "What the heck?!"
1

In order to send an actionable notification to the mobile app and respond to it, I needed to:

  • Send a notification with actions configured using YAML in data. It must have a tag.
  • A wait for trigger action: with a trigger for the mobile_app_notification_action event for each possible action id
  • Clear the notification, by sending a new notification with the same tag and a special message string (clear_notification)
  • A Choose action for each notification action, using template conditions matching against the action keys (in the wait.trigger.event.data.action variable)

It would be nice if there was a new action for actionable notifications that encapsulated these four separate actions in one:

  • Include a required field for the message’s tag (or just generate a unique tag for the automation run).
  • Automatically wait for the mobile_app_notification_action, with an optional timeout, that only continues if an expected action id is received.
  • Clear the notification when a response is received, or the timeout is reached
  • Allow a list of actions, where each is configured with a label, id, and set of actions to perform if chosen (the id could possibly be generated, to ensure it’s unique to the automation run).
  • An optional default list of actions if the notification times out.
2

This would be really nice!
I’ve set up some actionable notifications in the past, but it’s quite time-consuming, so I haven’t implemented them for everything I’d need.

1 Like
3

I also agree that this would be nice to have.