Notification System Guide¶

This guide covers how to use Orion's notification system from both the dashboard and CLI. Notifications keep you informed about important events in the content pipeline -- new trends, published content, failures, and pipeline stage changes.

Dashboard Notifications¶

Notification Bell¶

The notification bell icon appears in the top navigation bar. A red badge shows your unread notification count.

Click the bell to open the Notification Center, a dropdown panel listing your recent notifications.

Notification Center¶

The Notification Center shows your notifications in reverse chronological order. Each notification displays:

• Title -- What happened (e.g., "New trend detected: AI Coding")
• Body -- Additional context (if available)
• Timestamp -- When the event occurred
• Read status -- Unread notifications are highlighted

Actions:

• Click the check icon on an individual notification to mark it as read
• Click the double-check icon in the header to mark all notifications as read
• Click the X to close the panel

Real-Time Updates¶

Notifications are delivered in real-time via WebSocket. When a new event occurs (e.g., a trend is detected or content fails to generate), the bell badge updates immediately without requiring a page refresh. Multiple browser tabs all receive updates simultaneously.

Notification Preferences¶

Navigate to Settings > Notifications to configure which notification types you receive.

For each notification type, you can toggle:

• Enabled -- Whether to create a notification at all
• Push -- Whether to deliver it in real-time via WebSocket (if disabled, the notification is still created but only visible when you check the notification list)

Default preferences:

CLI Notifications¶

List Notifications¶

# List all notifications (paginated)
orion notifications list

# List unread notifications only
orion notifications list --unread

# Specify page number
orion notifications list --page 2

# Output as JSON
orion notifications list --format json

Check Unread Count¶

orion notifications count
# Output: Unread: 5

Mark as Read¶

# Mark a single notification as read
orion notifications read <notification-id>

# Mark all notifications as read
orion notifications read-all
# Output: Marked 5 notifications as read.

How It Works¶

Event Flow¶

1. A domain event occurs (e.g., Scout detects a new trend)
2. The originating service publishes to the appropriate Redis channel (e.g., orion.trend.detected)
3. The Identity service's notification consumer (a background task) receives the event
4. The consumer checks user preferences to determine if the notification should be created
5. If enabled, a notification record is created in PostgreSQL
6. If push is enabled, the notification is published to orion.notification.created on Redis
7. The Gateway's notification relay picks up the message and pushes it to the user's WebSocket connection(s)

Notification Types¶

User Targeting¶

• Broadcast events (like trend.detected) notify all active users with admin or editor roles
• Creator events (like content.published) notify only the user who created the content, identified by the created_by field in the event payload