Allow clear_notification by tag prefix

[nickw444]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently, to use clear_notification, you must use the tag to create a named identifier for the notification. This however, causes subsequent notifications with the same tag to replace the original due to Replacing

My use case is that I would like to be able to clear an entire group of notifications without needing to keep track of the specific tags given to these and have to keep track of a set of tags to call clear_notification on.

Ideally I would dynamically send each notification with

service: notify.mobile_app_<your_device_id_here>
data:
  message: "motion detected whilst away at {{ now() }}"
  data:
    group: "backyard-motion"
    tag: "backyard-motion-detected-{{ now() }}"

Describe the solution you'd like

Ideally there would be an extension of the clear_notifications API:

service: notify.mobile_app_<your_device_id_here>
data:
  message: "clear_notifications"
  data:
    tag-prefix: "backyard-motion-detected-"

Currently this is handled by this code:

iOS/Sources/Shared/Notifications/NotificationCommands/NotificationsCommandManager.swift

Lines 80 to 84 in 1db6f3c

	let keys = ["tag", "collapseId"].compactMap { payload[$0] as? String }
	if !keys.isEmpty {
	UNUserNotificationCenter.current().removeDeliveredNotifications(withIdentifiers: keys)
	}
	return .value(())

which I expect could be extended to call getDeliveredNotifications(completionHandler:) to retrieve the notification and their identifiers, and match them against the prefix and subsequently remove them

Additional context

I am not an iOS eng but happy to have a crack at this if there is a chance this would be accepted as a feature!

[zacwest]

I think being able to clear a given group makes sense, but tag-prefix seems a bit awkward. The former seems like an easy one to accept as a change.

You can write and test this in the iOS simulator using simctl push to trigger the notifications, so that eliminated a lot of the hard setup around push for local development on a device. However, this will also require adding to the fcm push to include e.g. the group - this one is relatively straightforward and could safely be implemented with just the test json files as a verification.

[nickw444]

Had a try of this this afternoon, however I wasn't quite able to trigger the right conditions in the app via simctl to test clear_notification (or any code paths that enter NotificationsCommandManager, specifically didReceiveRemoteNotification). It works fine with a standard notification with title/body

I tried a handful of payloads, including this one:

{
    "aps": {
        "content-available": 1
    },
    "homeassistant": {
        "command": "clear_notification",
        "tag": "test_tag"
    }
}

(which I arrived at by working backwards through the iOS app as well as the fixtures in the fcm push repo

firing them with the command xcrun simctl push booted io.robbie.HomeAssistant.dev ~/Desktop/clear_notification.apns

Perhaps you know the magic to make this work? 😅

---

edit: Ah a few more breakpoints later, now I think I understand

(in didFailToRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithError)

[zacwest]

Ah, darn, the pushes you can do with simctl don't trigger the remote flow. You can probably hook up the command manager to the "didReceiveResponse" delegate callback in NotificationManager so tapping on it triggers the command, for testing.