Understanding the Notifications Framework

The Notifications Framework provides a consistent, extensible communication mechanism that Campus Solutions product areas (consumers) can use to enable communications from their areas and a generic extensible framework which meets the real-time notifications needs of current features.

Customers can also craft their own solutions to use the framework without reinventing the lower level coding that enables notifications to be sent and tracked.

Notifications encompass a broad area of communications between the Campus Solutions system and users and also between users themselves. A notification may take these forms (referred to as channels):

  • Email

  • SMS

  • Alerts (for example, an informational message that appears on a portal homepage)

  • Worklist Items (an actionable hyperlink that appears on a portal homepage)

  • Push Notifications (for mobile apps on iOS/Android)

  • Announcements

The Notifications Framework:

  • Delivers an extensible, light-weight PeopleCode framework that can adapt to future needs.

  • Provides options to co-exist with, consume or be utilized by the existing COMMGEN processing.

  • Supports both real-time and batch notifications.

  • Provides a generic configurable notification solution that is not bound to any particular consuming application or to any particular UI technology.

  • Provides a Notification code level API that is flexible enough to be useful to all consuming applications; for example, Application Classes, Components, Application Engine programs, web services and so on.

  • Supports Timeout processing for worklist items.

  • Provides the ability to generate Reminder notifications for existing notifications.

At the deeper, technical level, the solution architecture uses the Entity Registry to generalize all notifications into a single structure. The architecture is modeled on a pluggable channel-based approach. Each notification type is supported by a dedicated channel that supports the idiosyncrasies of the particular notification type. All notification channels conform to the standard interface of a Notification Channel. As new notification types are identified, a new channel that conforms to the standard Channel interface will need to be created and registered with the framework.

The architecture has been implemented using vanilla PeopleTools application classes and Object Oriented design principles.

A vital point to understand is that the framework is not directly exposed to system users, but is used by consuming applications, also known as consumers (for example Delegated Access, New User Registration, Campus Mobile), which, in turn, interface with system users. PeopleSoft developers, rather than regular users, would directly interact with the framework, aside from the set up pages described below.