Notifications: Unable to get group notifications

[terencenjr]

Describe the bug

Group notifications are not showing for users belonging to the target group of the notification when viewed through the personal tab.

Expected Behavior

Group notifications should be shown together with the user's personal notifications.

What are the steps to reproduce this bug?

1. Used Insomnia API platform to send a request to backend to create a group notification. The payload is as such:

{
    "title": "Group Notification",
    "message": "Testing",
    "origin": "example",
    "topic": "Notice",
    "targetGroups": [
        "default/example"
    ]
}

2. Logged in to a user belonging to the example group
3. Click on the notifications sidebar item

Versions of software used and environment

Backstage Version: 1.19.6

[terencenjr]

I discovered the bug comes from the getUserGroups function in the backend side. When getting the group entity ref from the spec.memberOf, it comes with the 'group:' prefix (e.g. group:default/example). When querying the database, it does not match the group name stored, which is default/example. I suggest doing a slice to remove the 'group:' part before returning.

function getUserGroups(
  catalogClient: CatalogClient,
  user: string,
): Promise<string[]> {
  return catalogClient.getEntityByRef(`user:${user}`).then(userRef => {
    if (!userRef) {
      throw new Error(`user '${user}' does not exist`);
    }

    if (userRef.spec && Array.isArray(userRef.spec.memberOf)) {
      return userRef.spec.memberOf.map(value => {
        if (value) {
          return value.toString().slice('group:'.length); // << Added slice() to remove the group prefix
        }
        return '';
      });
    }

    return [];
  });
}

[invincibleJai]

cc @mareklibra @ydayagi ^^

[ydayagi]

the 'group' string has to be there. it is part of an entity ref. an entity ref is just like k8s resources. kind:namespace:name.

check that in the catalog you have a group in namespace default. how was the user added to the group?

[terencenjr]

Hi @ydayagi, I agree that the entityRef should follow the given format. The issue I am raising is towards the mismatch of the group entityRef format that is retrieved from the memberOf property and the one that is stored in the DB. Looking at the createNotifications function, the target group is retrieved from the request and stored in the DB without prepending 'group:'.

There are two ways of doing this:

1. Remove the 'group:' when retrieving the group entity ref (which I have suggested)
2. Prepend the 'group:' prefix to the target group before storing in DB (I don't recommend this to ensure consistency with the user notification side)

[ydayagi]

@terencenjr fixed in PR #1273