Subscribe, Report and Notify: Basics of Notifications

Introduction

In FME Flow, notifications let you send messages directly to users via channels such as email or mobile device services. While Automations now provide a more flexible way to handle this functionality, the following tutorial walks through the legacy method of sending notifications using topics, subscriptions, and messages. You’ll learn how to format a JSON message that contains both the notification content and the recipient’s identifier, and how to deliver it using the REST API. For more information on Automations, see Getting Started with Automations.

Step-by-step Instructions

Sending a Notification to a User

To send a notification in FME Flow, there are three steps:

1. Create a topic.
2. Create a subscription that listens to the topic.
3. Send a message to the topic.

For detailed instructions, see the Notification Service documentation. 

The message sent to the topic and read by the subscriber is a JSON-formatted document. In this context, the JSON must contain at least two things:

• The actual content of the notification to send.
• The device ID / Email address to send the notification to.

Example for email:

{
"email_to" : "foo@bar.com",
"subscriber_content" : "Hi, this is your FME Flow"
}

Notification Content

This is the message you want to broadcast to anyone who is subscribed.

“subscriber_content”: “here is the notification message”

Device IDs / Email Addresses

For each subscription protocol, the JSON differs slightly. Notifications can be sent to a single device/user or to multiple devices/users. For multiple, you just need to separate the identifiers with a comma.

Subscribers

Example JSON

• Email

"email_to" : "foo@bar.com,foo2@bar.com"

For a complete list of Subscribers, see the documentation.