OpenCompany Notify Service

Background

Collaboration is a key part of the success of any organization, executed through a clearly defined vision and mission and based on transparency and constant communication.

-- Dinesh Paliwal

Teams struggle to keep everyone on the same page. People are hyper-connected in the moment with chat and email, but it gets noisy as teams grow, and people miss key information. Everyone needs clear and consistent leadership, and the solution is surprisingly simple and effective - great leadership updates that build transparency and alignment.

With that in mind we designed Carrot, a software-as-a-service application powered by the open source OpenCompany platform and a source-available web UI.

With Carrot, important company updates, announcements, stories, and strategic plans create focused, topic-based conversations that keep everyone aligned without interruptions. When information is shared transparently, it inspires trust, new ideas and new levels of stakeholder engagement. Carrot makes it easy for leaders to engage with employees, investors, and customers, creating alignment for everyone.

Transparency expectations are changing. Organizations need to change as well if they are going to attract and retain savvy teams, investors and customers. Just as open source changed the way we build software, transparency changes how we build successful companies with information that is open, interactive, and always accessible. Carrot turns transparency into a competitive advantage.

To get started, head to: Carrot

Overview

The OpenCompany Notify Service handles initiating notifications mentions in comments and posts, and comment replies to posts.

Local Setup

Prospective users of Carrot should get started by going to Carrot.io. The following local setup is for developers wanting to work on the OpenCompany Notify Service.

Most of the dependencies are internal, meaning Leiningen will handle getting them for you. There are a few exceptions:

• Java - a Java 8+ JRE is needed to run Clojure
• Amazon Web Services DynamoDB or DynamoDB Local - fast NoSQL database
• Leiningen 2.9.1+ - Clojure's build and dependency management tool

Java

Your system may already have Java 8+ installed. You can verify this with:

java -version

If you do not have Java 8+ download it and follow the installation instructions.

An option we recommend is OpenJDK. There are instructions for Linux and Homebrew can be used to install OpenJDK on a Mac with:

brew update && brew cask install adoptopenjdk8

Leiningen

Leiningen is easy to install:

1. Download the latest lein script from the stable branch.
2. Place it somewhere that's on your $PATH (env | grep PATH). /usr/local/bin is a good choice if it is on your PATH.
3. Set it to be executable. chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/lein
4. Run it: lein This will finish the installation.

Then let Leiningen install the rest of the dependencies:

git clone https://github.com/open-company/open-company-notify.git
cd open-company-notify
lein deps

DynamoDB Local

DynamoDB is easy to install with the executable jar for most operating systems.

Extract the compressed file to a place that will be handy to run DynamoDB from, /usr/local/dynamodb for example will work on most Unix-like operating systems.

mkdir /usr/local/dynamodb
tar -xvf dynamodb_local_latest.tar.gz -C /usr/local/dynamodb

Run DynamoDB on port 8000 with:

cd /usr/local/dynamodb && java -Djava.library.path=DynamoDBLocal_lib -jar DynamoDBLocal.jar -sharedDb

AWS DynamoDB

For production, it is recommended you use Amazon DynamoDB in the cloud rather than DynamoDB Local. Follow the instructions for setting up the cloud service in your AWS account.

Required Secrets

Make sure you update the section in project.clj that looks like this to contain your actual AWS secrets and SQS queue name:

;; Dev environment and dependencies
:dev [:qa {
  :env ^:replace {
    :log-level "debug"
    :aws-access-key-id "CHANGE-ME"
    :aws-secret-access-key "CHANGE-ME"
    :aws-sqs-notify-queue "CHANGE-ME"
    :aws-sqs-expo-queue "CHANGE-ME"
    :aws-lambda-expo-prefix "PREFIX-AS-EXPLAINED-ABOVE"""
  }

You can also override these settings with environmental variables in the form of AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, etc. Use environmental variables to provide production secrets when running in production.

You will also need to subscribe the SQS queue to the storage and interaction SNS topics. To do this you will need to go to the AWS console and follow these instruction:

Go to the AWS SQS Console and select the change queue configured above. From the 'Queue Actions' dropdown, select 'Subscribe Queue to SNS Topic'. Select the SNS topic you've configured your Storage Service instance to publish to, and click the 'Subscribe' button. Repeat the process for the SNS topic you've configured your Interaction Service instance to publish to.

The aws-sqs-expo-queue is read by auth directly to consume Expo push notification tickets produced by the notify service. These tickets are then exchanged for push notification receipts with the Expo server in order to determine if the pushes were successful. In the case that a push notification failed, it is the responsibility of the auth service to remove the invalid push tokens from the database. This can happen if the user uninstalls the mobile application, for example. Subsequent push notification attempts will fail, because the push token on record is no longer valid. Expo recommends allowing 30 minutes to pass before a ticket is exchanged for a receipt to allow the respective push services time to deal with high volume. Because of this, the SQS queue should be configured with a delay in production scenarios. At the time or writing, the maximum queue delay allowed is 15 minutes, which is okay for our purposes.

Usage

Prospective users of Carrot should get started by going to Carrot.io. The following usage is for developers wanting to work on the OpenCompany Notify Service.

Make sure you've updated project.clj as described above.

To start a production instance:

lein start!

Or to start a development instance:

lein start

To clean all compiled files:

lein clean

To create a production build run:

lein build

To start the development REPL:

lein repl

Technical Design

The OpenCompany Notify Service...

The notify service is composed of 6 main responsibilities, which are:

• Consuming storage post creation and edit events looking for new user mentions
• Consuming interaction comment creation and edit events looking for new user mentions
• Initiating user notifications via SQS messaging to the email or bot services
• Persisting new notifications in DynamoDB
• Accepting Web socket connections from clients, and responding with existing notifications
• Informing connected clients of new notifications to the connected user

DynamoDB Schema

The DynamoDB schema is quite simple and is made up of just 1 table: notification. To support multiple environments, this table is prefixed with an environment name, such as staging_notification or production_notification.

The notification table has a string partition key called user_id and a string sort key called notify_at. A full item in the table is:

{
  "user_id": 4hex-4hex-4hex UUID, _partition key_
  "board_id": 4hex-4hex-4hex UUID,
  "entry_id": 4hex-4hex-4hex UUID,
  "interaction_id": 4hex-4hex-4hex UUID,
  "notify_at": ISO8601, _sort_key_
  "mention": true/false,
  "content": string,
  "author": Object,
  "ttl": epoch-time
}

The meaning of each item in the table above is that there was a notification of the user specified by the user_id of a mention (mention is true) or a reply (mention is false) from the post specified by the container_id and item_id or from the comment specified by the container_id, item_id and interaction_id at the notify_at time. The reply/mention consisted of the content (an extract) and was by the author, and this record will expire and be removed from DynamoDB at ttl time (configured by notification_ttl in config.clj.

SQS Messaging

The notify service consumes SQS messages in JSON format from the notify queue. These messages inform the notify service about changes to data in the storage and interaction service.

{
 :notification-type "add|update|delete",
 :notification-at ISO8601,
 :user {...},
 :org {...},
 :board {...},
 :content {:new {...},
           :old {...}}
}

The notify service sends SQS messages in JSON format to the email and bot queues. These messages inform the email and bot services about notification requests to the user.

Email:

Bot:

WebSocket Messaging

WebSocket messages are in EDN format.

Client connects to the server at /notify-socket/user/<user-uuid> with a :chsk/handshake message.

Server sends a :user/notifications message over the socket with a sequence of notifications.

[:user/notifications 
  {:user-id "1111-1111-1111"
   :notifications [
    {
      :user-id "1111-1111-1111"
      :board-id "2222-2222-2222"
      :entry-id "3333-3333-3333"
      :interaction-id "4444-4444-4444"
      :content "Reply to me."
      :author {:user-id "1234-5678-1234", :name "Wile E. Coyote", :avatar-url "http://www.emoticonswallpapers.com/avatar/cartoons/Wiley-Coyote-Dazed.jpg"}
      :mention? false
      :notify-at "2018-07-31T15:07:49.699Z"
    }
    {
      :content "Mention @me."
      :user-id "1111-1111-1111"
      :board-id "2222-2222-2222"
      :entry-id "3333-3333-3333"
      :interaction-id "5555-5555-5555"
      :author {:user-id "1234-5678-1234", :name "Wile E. Coyote", :avatar-url "http://www.emoticonswallpapers.com/avatar/cartoons/Wiley-Coyote-Dazed.jpg"}
      :mention? false
      :notify-at "2018-07-31T15:08:48.162Z"
    }]
  }
]

At any point, the client may send a :user/notifications message requesting an updated sequence of notifications in a :user/notifications response from the server.

At any point, the server may send a :user/notification, this indicates a new notification for the connected user.

Testing

Tests are run in continuous integration of the master and mainline branches on Travis CI:

To run the tests locally:

lein kibit
lein eastwood
lein midje

Participation

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms.

License

Distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3.

Copyright © 2015-2021 OpenCompany, LLC.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.