Notifications

• Introduction
• Creating Notifications
• Sending Laravel 5 Notifications

Introduction

Notifications are a great way to inform your users of things that are happening in your application. For example, you might use a notification to let a user know when a team member has completed a given to-do list task. These notifications are viewable by clicking on the "notification bell" icon in the application's navigation bar. The notification bell will have a red activity indicator when there are unread announcements or notifications.

Creating Notifications

To create a notification, inject the Laravel\Spark\Contracts\Repositories\NotificationRepository into your controller or any other class which is being resolved by the Laravel service container:

use Laravel\Spark\Contracts\Repositories\NotificationRepository;

public function __construct(NotificationRepository $notifications)
{
    $this->notifications = $notifications;
}

Then, you may use the create method to create the notification:

$this->notifications->create($user, [
    'icon' => 'fa-users',
    'body' => 'A team member completed a task!',
    'action_text' => 'View Task',
    'action_url' => '/link/to/task',
]);

The action_text and action_url attributes are optional so you do not need to pass them in order to create a notification. However, providing these attributes will create a button on the notification where the user can be directed to some other location with information relevant to the notification.

When a notification is created, Spark will fire the Laravel\Spark\Events\NotificationCreated event, which your application can listen for to do work after a notification is created.

Sending Laravel 5 Notifications

Spark also allows you to send notifications using the Laravel 5 notification system. To create a notification, you may use the following Artisan command:

php artisan make:notification TaskCompleted

This command will place a fresh notification in your app/Notifications directory. You may add the notification to Spark's notification table by specifying the SparkChannel channel in your notification's via method. The SparkChannel may be thought of as a replacement to Laravel's default database channel:

use Laravel\Spark\Notifications\SparkChannel;

public function via($notifiable)
{
    return [SparkChannel::class];
}

Formatting Notifications

Before using the SparkChannel, you should define a toSpark method on the notification class. This method will receive a $notifiable entity and should return a SparkNotification object:

use Laravel\Spark\Notifications\SparkNotification;

public function toSpark($notifiable)
{
    return (new SparkNotification)
                  ->action('View Task', '/link/to/task')
                  ->icon('fa-users')
                  ->body('A team member completed a task!');
}

Sending Notifications

Notifications may be sent in two ways: using the notify method of the Notifiable trait or by using the Notification facade. You may take a look at the Laravel notification documentation to get more details regarding these two approaches to sending notifications.

Here's an example of sending notifications to a Spark user using the notify method:

$user->notify(new TaskCompleted);

When sending a notification to a team, all members of that team will be notified:

$team->notify(new TaskCompleted);