Email Notifier

General

Daisy can send out emails when changes are made to documents. To make use of this the SMTP host must be correctly configured, which is usually done as part of the installation, but can be changed afterwards (see below). In the Daisy Wiki, individual users can subscribe to get notifications by selecting the "User Settings" link, making sure their email address is filled in, and checking the checkbox next to "Receive email notifications of document-related changes.".

Users will only receive events of documents to which they have full read access rights (without any restrictions specified in the access details). It is possible to receive notifications for individual documents, for all documents belonging to a certain collection, or for all documents. The mails will notify document creation, document updates or version state changes.

While we usually talk about documents, the actual notifications happen on the document variant level.

As you can see on the User Settings page, it is also possible to subscribe to other events: user, schema, collection and ACL related changes. However, for these events proper formatting of the mails is not yet implemented, they simply contain an XML dump of the event.

Configuration

Configuration of the email options happens in the <DAISY_DATA>/conf/myconfig.xml file. There you can configure:

• the SMTP server
• the from address for the emails
• the URLs for documents, so that the URL of the changed document can be included in the emails
• users who's events should be ingored (see below)
• whether email notifications should be enabled (a global enable/disable flag)

After making any changes to the myconfig.xml file, the repository server needs to be restarted.

Ignoring events from users

Sometimes when doing automated document updates, a lot of change events might be produced, and it can be undesirable to produce email notifications for these events.

For this, the email notifier can be configured to ignore the events caused by certain users. For example, if you have an application which connects as user "john" to the repository server, then it is possible to say that events (document updates etc.) caused by john should not result in email notifications.

The users who's events should be ignored can be configured in the myconfig.xml (use this for permanent settings), but can also be changed at runtime through the JMX console (use this for temporarily disabling notifications for a user).

Implementation notes

The email notifier is an extension component running inside the repository server. It is independent of the Daisy Wiki. The email notifier provides a Java API for managing the subscriptions, as well as additions to the HTTP+XML interface (logical, because that's how the implementation of the Java API talks to the repository).