Notifications are a powerful tool that allows you to keep your users informed and engaged with your app. They can be used to alert users of important events, such as the completion of a long process or the arrival of a new message. In this guide, we will show you how to use notifications in your app using Laravel Orchid.

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Flash Messages

A flash notification is a one-time message that will be automatically deleted after the user views it. These notifications are designed to inform the user of an event that has just occurred, such as the successful saving of data.

To create a flash notification, you can use the following code:

use Orchid\Support\Facades\Alert;

Alert::message('Welcome Aboard!');

You can also use a shorter version of this code:

alert('Your action has been completed.');

In addition to displaying a message, Laravel Orchid also allows you to visually indicate the type of notification using different colors. You can do this using the following methods:

Alert::info('Welcome to our website!')
Alert::success('Your message has been sent.')
Alert::error('Please fill in all required fields.')
Alert::warning('Your account will be permanently deleted.')

If you want to use a custom template for your notifications, you can use the view method. This method takes three arguments: the path/name of the Blade template, the color of the notification, and an array of variables to be passed to the template.

use Orchid\Support\Facades\Alert;
use Orchid\Support\Color;

Alert::view('alert', Color::INFO(), [
    'name' => 'Alexandr'
]);

The Blade template would look something like this:

// resources/views/alert.blade.php

Hello <strong>{{ $name }}</strong>

It is important to note that flash notifications are deleted after they are viewed, so if you need to retain the notification data, you should consider using other types of notifications such as persistent notifications.

That being said, Flash notifications are a great way to provide quick and concise feedback to the user without cluttering the interface, and makes it easy to implement and customize them to fit the needs of your app.

Toast Messages

Toast messages are small pop-up notifications that appear in the upper right corner of the screen. They are designed to briefly notify the user of the result of an action or event, such as the successful completion of a task. Toast messages are similar to flash notifications, but have a different appearance and a few additional features.

To create a toast message, you can use the following code:

use Orchid\Support\Facades\Toast;

Toast::warning('Invalid input. Please check your form.')

One of the additional features of toast messages is the ability to specify whether the message should automatically hide after a certain period of time or not. By default, toast messages will automatically hide after a few seconds, but you can disable this behavior by using the autoHide method:

Toast::warning('Invalid input. Please check your form.')
    ->autoHide(false);

You can also specify the delay time before the toast message appears by using the delay method. This method takes one argument, which is the number of milliseconds to wait before showing the message:

Toast::warning('Invalid input. Please check your form.')
    ->delay(2000);

Toast messages are a useful way to provide quick feedback to the user without interrupting their workflow.

Persistent Notification

Persistent notification are different from flash messages, they are not deleted after being viewed and can be sent to users even when they are offline. They are an excellent way to inform, for example, for a task manager application to notify an employee about a new task.

You can view these notifications by clicking the “Notification Bell icon” in the application navigation bar. If there are unread notifications, a counter will be displayed.

Before using this feature, it’s important to check out the Laravel notification documentation as it provides more details and examples on how to use this feature.

To create a notification, you can use the following Artisan command:

php artisan make:notification TaskCompleted

This command will create a new class in your app/Notifications directory.

To send the notification, you must add the DashboardChannel to the via notification method:

use Orchid\Platform\Notifications\DashboardChannel;

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

Before sending the notification, you must also define a toDashboard method in the notification class. This method will receive a $notifiable object and must return a DashboardMessage object:

use Orchid\Platform\Notifications\DashboardMessage;

public function toDashboard($notifiable)
{
    return (new DashboardMessage)
        ->title('New Task: January Report')
        ->message('Please review the task details and deadline.')
        ->action(url('/'));
}

Notifications can be sent in two ways: by using the notify method in the Notifiable trait or by using the Notification facade. You can take a look at Laravel Notification Documentation to learn more about these two approaches to sending notifications.

Here is an example of how to send notifications to a user using the 'notify’ method:

$user = User::find(1);

$user->notify(new TaskCompleted);