TL;DR What would be an appropriate way to monitor the current list of
pending notifications in a Lipstick session?
In the older Meegotouch "system-ui" there was the concept of
notification sinks. Processes external to system-ui could register [1] a
notification sink (ie a D-Bus object implementing a certain interface
[2]). All registered sinks were called every time a new notification was
received by system-ui or destroyed. This was used by 3rd party programs
to e.g. light up a LED every time a notification was received [3] or to
forward notifications to MetaWatch [4] and Pebble [5] smart watches.
Lipstick adopts a new API that is closer to the Freedesktop
notification API. However, it drops the notification sinks concept.
Thus, the above feature is lost except for the compositor process
itself, which can just ::connect() to the NotificationManager's signals.
I am trying to figure out if there any alternatives to monitor
notifications from an application in Nemo/SailfishOS. My goal is to port
my MetaWatch app over to SailfishOS, or even do something more standard
such as implementing the Bluetooth 'Alert Notification Profile' or
Apple's equivalent ('Apple Notification Center Service') which allow
forwarding of notifications to watches and other companion devices.
So far, I've considered a few options:
1) Monitor method calls to org.freedesktop.notifications without
actually registering it. This sounds hackish but would be 'compatible'
with FDO-compliant notification managers. Things like persistence would
be broken, but I'm not sure of how useful persistence is.
2) Monitor Lipstick's SQLite database for changes. Terribly hackish.
3) Add notifications sinks support to Lipstick. As another
'proprietary' extension over the FDO protocol. Trivially, just emitting
"NotificationAdded", "NotificationRemoved", ... D-BUS signals would be
enough.
4) Does Lipstick accept binary plugins that may access its
NotificationManager instance? Would that work in SailfishOS?
5) ??? Some alternate API I've missed.
Any ideas or recommendations? Criticism is welcome.
[1]
https://gitorious.org/meegotouch/meegotouch-systemui/source/src/systemui/notifications/dbusinterfacenotificationsink.xml
[2]
https://gitorious.org/meegotouch/meegotouch-systemui/source/src/systemui/notifications/notificationareasink.h
[3] http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1121878
[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD7FisaZsKM
[5] http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=89890
