Building message notifications

[jtgi]

gm from ethsf,

We are interested in using a snap to show a notification in metamask when their account has received a message.
The messaging api is a third party off-chain service.

The stumbling point at the moment is: how to do some kind of polling or periodic checking for messages (ie: an api call) within a snap, without requiring clients to implement new rpc methods. Forcing clients to support our snaps rpc methods would kill chances of adoption.

Ideally, I could:

1. Run a background service and poll an api and trigger a snap notification whenever, or
2. If no background service, hook into common rpc events, like eth_requestAccounts and trigger a fetch for new messages to then trigger a notification.

I've looked at the docs closely and it seems like this isn't possible, is there any workaround–even if hacky?
Could I hook into transaction insights and trigger a notification?

Thank you!

[ritave]

Hello @jtgi, last week we've build cronjobs, which allow you to run background periodic snaps.

It's not currently released inside Flask yet, so please watch for upcoming announcements.

[jtgi]

This is just what I would need. Thank you for your response!

[Navaneeth-Bysani]

Hi @ritave Is there a way to do this notification kind of service without polling? Like using websockets or something!

[ritave]

We have some floating ideas to do push-based APIs in the future, but nothing concrete as of right now.

[Navaneeth-Bysani]

@ritave In continuation to the previous one, is it a good idea to use push (EPNS) to implement notifications? Doing this would require a central server that sends a notification to the user. The server doesn't need to store data, so practically, there is no leveraging of user data (which is the principle of web3)

[ritave]

@Navaneeth-Bysani we're aware about EPNS, we didn't have the time to look at any concrete solution yet.