wiki:Notifications

Version 1 (modified by romw, 14 years ago) (diff)

Initial dump

BOINC Notification System

As the number of projects increase it becomes increasingly difficult for volunteers to keep track of any relevant news a project publishes. Volunteers may only check project websites once in a blue moon. A system is needed to keep the volunteers engaged with a project.

When we talk about volunteers in regards to this feature we are actually talking about three different types of volunteers:

  • A volunteer who attaches to a project but doesn’t participate in the forums.
  • A volunteer who attaches to a project and participates in the forums.
  • A volunteer who attaches to a project and becomes involved enough with the project that they begin to help the project with support issues.

The volunteer should be in control of how much information is going to be exposed to them by way of the notification system.

The rest of this document will describe how the notification system will work.

Feed

When a volunteer attaches to a project, one or more notification feeds become available to them. These feeds are published using the RSS 0.92 specification (http://www.rssboard.org/rss-0-9-2).

Example feeds a project may wish to expose are:

  • Project news (http://<project_url>/rss_main.php)
  • Scientist blogs
  • Administrator blogs
  • Private Messages
  • Forum threads that a volunteer is monitoring
  • A whole forum to answer questions or to deal with problems as they arise.

For private feeds no information should be provided without the full authenticator. Weak authenticators should be treated as though no authenticator has been provided.

Example:

http://www.example.com/rss_main.php
http://www.example.com/forum_pm_rss.php?auth=4ebd3e5fd8a88f48ed708f04f81fefb7

Feed List

The feed list is published to the client software as part of the client parse-able project preferences.

When the client software connects to the server scheduler it’ll receive an updated list of feeds the client should download as well as any special properties about the feed(private feed for example).

Example:

<notification_feeds>
    <feed>
        <url>http://www.example.com/rss_main.php</url>
        <name>Project News</name>
        <update >86400</update>
    </feed>
    <feed>
        <url>http://www.example.com/ forum_pm_rss.php</url>
        <name>Private Messages</name>
        <update >86400</update>
        <private />
    </feed>
</notification_feeds>

Property table:

Attribute Default Value Meaning
url <null> The URL to access the feed
name <null> Volunteer friendly name for the feed
update 86400 Number of seconds in between updates
private false Should the authenticator be provided to the feed
disabled false feed is disabled and the client should not request updates
disabled_date <null> the epoch time in which the feed was disabled. A month passed the date and both the server and client software should delete any relevant information about the feed.

Server Scheduler

The server scheduler is responsible for aggregating the various pieces of information about feeds and pushes the result to the client as part of the scheduler reply. A similar process is used for the GUI URLs.

General workflow:

  • Issue query to determine of the volunteer has customized their feeds.
  • Read feeds.xml for feed baseline.
  • Merge the results of feeds.xml and the results of the query, with preference given to the volunteer’s selections.

If an empty result set is returned by the database, then pass the contents of feeds.xml unmodified.

Core Client

Client Manager

Screen Saver

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