Notifications

Laravel 5.3 introduced a brand new notification system with support for custom channels like mail, slack, sms, etc. Laravel Doctrine offers a doctrine channel so notifications can also be stored in your database.

Notification entity

First create a Notification entity in your project that extends LaravelDoctrine\ORM\Notifications\Notification. Adding protected $user is only needed when you are using annotations. All other metadata drivers can use the already existing $user property. It might look like this:

<?php

namespace App\Entities;

use Doctrine\ORM\Mapping AS ORM;

/**
 * @ORM\Entity
 */
class Notification extends \LaravelDoctrine\ORM\Notifications\Notification
{
    /**
     * @ORM\ManyToOne(targetEntity="App\Entities\User")
     */
    protected $user;
}

LaravelDoctrine\ORM\Notifications\Notification offers a couple of fluent methods:

$n->to($user)
  ->success();

$n->error();

$n->level('info')
  ->message('Your notification message')
  ->action('Click here', 'http://yoururl.com');

It also has getters to retrieve information about the notification:

$n->getId();
$n->getUser();
$n->getLevel();
$n->getMessage();
$n->getActionText();
$n->getActionUrl();

Publishing notifications on the doctrine channel

It's recommended you read the Laravel docs: https://laravel.com/docs/notifications

The Doctrine channel is available as: LaravelDoctrine\ORM\Notifications\DoctrineChannel::class

When adding this channel you need to provide a toEntity method. This method should return a new instance of your Notification class. You can use the fluent methods like described above.

<?php

namespace App\Notifications;

class InvoicePaid extends \Illuminate\Notifications\Notification
{
    /**
     * Get the notification's delivery channels.
     *
     * @param  mixed $notifiable
     * @return array
     */
    public function via($notifiable)
    {
        return [\LaravelDoctrine\ORM\Notifications\DoctrineChannel::class];
    }

    /**
     * @param $notifiable
     * @return $this
     */
    public function toEntity($notifiable)
    {
        return (new \App\Entities\Notification)
            ->to($notifiable)
            ->success()
            ->message('Some message')
            ->action('Bla', 'http://test.nl');
    }
}

Notifiable Entity

Your Notifiable entity should use the LaravelDoctrine\ORM\Notifications\Notifiable trait.

Now you will be able to do $user->notify(new InvoicePaid);

class User 
{
    use LaravelDoctrine\ORM\Notifications\Notifiable;
}

Custom Entity Manager

By default the Doctrine Channel will find the first suitable EM to persist the Notification by using the ManagerRegistry.

If you want more control over it, you can specify it inside your notifiable entity (most likely your User entity). Usage of the LaravelDoctrine\ORM\Notifications\Notifiable is required.

public function routeNotificationForDoctrine()
{
    return 'custom';
}