Notification Listeners

To let other components in the system know about displayed notifications we use the White-Board-Pattern to consume listener services in our NotificationServiceImpl class. A listener for notifications has a very easy interface:

public interface NotificationListener extends EventListener {
  void onEvent(NotificationEvent event);
}

It extends the default Java (empty) EventListener base interface and contains a single method. This single method and its associated event object allows us to extend the kind of events we can publish without changing the interface for each new event like "Show" or "Hide". For now we will only publish "Show" events. But if in the future we decide to also notify listeners about the close/hide of a notification popup we would have to add another method to the interface "onHide" and breaking the API somehow. Using an event object we can put the type of the event inside the event object and the client would then have to decide what to do for each event type. It would still only implement a single method "onEvent" instead of having to implement a new method for each new event type such as "onShow" or "onHide". The event object itself looks like this:

public class NotificationEvent extends EventObject {
private static final long serialVersionUID = -8633958140848611658L;

private Notification notification;

private NotificationEventType type;

public NotificationEvent(NotificationService source, Notification notification, NotificationEventType type) {
  super(source);
  this.notification = notification;
  this.type = type;
}

public Notification getNotification() {
  return notification;
}

public NotificationEventType getType() {
  return type;
}
}

The event type is an enum:

public enum NotificationEventType {
Show
}

The NotificationServiceImpl is only slightly changed:

Object listeners[] = context.locateServices("NotificationListener"); //$NON-NLS-1$
if (listeners != null) {
 NotificationEvent event = new NotificationEvent(this, notification, NotificationEventType.Show);
 for (Object listener : listeners) {
   try {
     ((NotificationListener)listener).onEvent(event);
   } catch (Throwable e) {          
   }
 }
}

Right before we display the notification we get all the NotificationListener registered in the OSGi system and (safely) call their onEvent method. There are several ways to get the list of currently registered NotificationListener services. One way is to use the BundleContext.getServiceReferences(String, String) method. But this would involve getting the service object ourself and not forget to "unget" it also. Another way is to use a ServiceTracker. But since our implementation already is a Component with bindings we can just add a new binding to our service component definition XML:

<reference cardinality="0..n" interface="ui.notification.NotificationListener" name="NotificationListener" policy="dynamic"/>

We then use the ComponentContext object to get an array of services that could be bound to "NotificationListener" (as named in the component XML). This context we get from OSGi in a new protected method:

protected void activate(ComponentContext context) {
 this.context = context;
}

That's all for notifying listeners about notification display. We can now create a simple new bundle that will register a NotificationListener into the system and simply System.out.println the notifications data.

public class SysoutNotificationListener implements NotificationListener {

  public void onEvent(NotificationEvent event) {
    if (event.getType() == NotificationEventType.Show) {
      System.out.println(event.getNotification().getTitle() + ": " //$NON-NLS-1$
          + event.getNotification().getMessage());
    }
  }
}

Its component definition would look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<scr:component xmlns:scr="http://www.osgi.org/xmlns/scr/v1.1.0" name="ui.notification.listener.sysout">
 <implementation class="ui.notification.listener.sysout.internal.SysoutNotificationListener"/>
 <service>
    <provide interface="ui.notification.NotificationListener"/>
 </service>
</scr:component>

Pretty simple. Here is what the result looks like: Listeners could also be used to log a history of notifications in various ways. In the next chapter of this series we will develop a View for Eclipse RCP apps that logs a history of notifications in a table.