Skip to content

System alerts

System alerts are a navigation component that informs users about important system messages and updates, thus enabling quick and effective communication to all users. For example, alerts can be used to communicate planned downtimes or provide information about current operational issues, such as performance degradation.

Alerts are displayed as a prominent, blinking megaphone and can contain links as well as other Markdown content. Users must actively dismiss the popover to hide it.

Functionality

Displaying alerts

  • The component displays system notifications in the form of a popover.
  • When new alerts are available, the popover opens to draw users’ attention.
  • Once users have read the alerts or closed the popover, the messages remain accessible via a dropdown.

Caching

  • Alerts are retrieved from the database and cached per language for five minutes.
  • The visibility of new alerts is managed using a cookie (seen_alerts).
  • Read alerts are stored via cookies to prevent users from seeing the same notification repeatedly.

Configuration and localization

Alerts can be created via the Rails console:

Alert.create!(
  publish_at: 1.hour.ago,
  publish_until: 2.hours.from_now,
  translations: {
    'en' => {
      'title' => 'Planned downtime',
      'text' => 'The _platform_ will be **unavailable for the next hour**. For further information on downtimes, [refer to this page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtime).',
    },
  }
)

The text in the translations supports Markdown, allowing formatting and links.