Proposal: Notification function

[mira-miracoli]

We discussed about how to inform users that their ITs will be terminated after 24h. There were several suggestions: The website, training material, as static text in the 'running ITs' window and a notification that is send to users.
So I came to the idea that maybe TPV can send notifications to the user via the Galaxy API. These could be specified e.g. similar to the fail message and be triggered by a rule like:

- if: input_size > 10
  notify:
    msg: 
    subject: "Tool suggestion for *small file Tool*",
    message: "Please consider using the *tool for larger input files*",
    category: "info"
# OR
- if: true
  notify:
    subject: "24h lifetime for Interactive Tools",
    message: "For giving everyone a shorter waiting time we terminate Interactive tools after 24h",
    category: "warning"

Please share your opinions and ideas

[nuwang]

If this is used often enough, providing a shorthand syntax may be worthwhile, but I'll wait for others to chime in. One suggestion, can we prototype this first with:

if: input_size > 10
execute:
   # do this notification using the API somehow

We could even start off with just a helper function in helpers.py. Later we can introduce the notify shorthand syntax?

[bgruening]

A helper function could work in the beginning.

A few more use-cases:

• deprecating tools (tophat)
• moving users from one tool to a more performant tool (fastqc --> falco)
• known bugs in certain tool versions
• certain hints for GPU tools or otherwise limited tools