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 is automatically deleted after the user views it. Designed to inform the user of a recent event—such as the successful saving of data—flash notifications provide quick, concise feedback without cluttering the interface. If you need to retain notification data, consider using persistent notifications instead.

Alert Messages

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 prevent the automatic escaping of data in your alerts, you can use the withoutEscaping method. By default, data passed to the alert is escaped to prevent XSS attacks. Calling this method will disable that behavior:

use Orchid\Support\Facades\Alert;

Alert::info('This is <strong>bold</strong> text.')
    ->withoutEscaping();

This will render the HTML content in the message without escaping it.

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 like this:

{{-- resources/views/alert.blade.php --}}

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

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. By default, toast messages will automatically hide after a few seconds, but you can disable this behavior by using the persistent method:

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

To re-enable auto-hide, simply call the autoHide method again.

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

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

The seconds method allows you to set the delay before hiding the toast message, but in seconds instead of milliseconds. This makes it easier to configure the delay in a more human-readable format:

Toast::info('Your data has been saved!')
    ->seconds(5);  // 5 seconds delay before hiding

If you want to prevent the automatic escaping of data in your toasts, you can use the withoutEscaping method. By default, data passed to the toast is escaped to prevent XSS attacks. Calling this method will disable that behavior:

use Orchid\Support\Facades\Toast;

Toast::info('This is <strong>bold</strong> text.')
    ->withoutEscaping();

This will render the HTML content in the message without escaping it.

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 send a notification, you can simply pass a DashboardMessage instance to a user’s notify method.
Before proceeding, ensure that your user model implements the Notifiable trait:

use Orchid\Platform\Notifications\DashboardMessage;
use Orchid\Support\Color;

$user->notify(DashboardMessage::make()
    ->title('New Task: January Report')
    ->message('Please review the task details and deadline.')
    ->action('https://example.com/reports/january')
    ->type(Color::INFO)
);

You can also create a custom notification class using 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);