Laravel 8: How to properly return notifications on blade

I’m working with Laravel 8 to develop my project which is an Online Forum and for this project I wanted to add some notification feature that can alert the user if someone has answered a question that he had asked on the forum.

So basically, when someone answers a question, this method will run:

public function postAnswer(Question $id)
{
    $validate_data = Validator::make(request()->all(),[
        'answer' => 'required',
    ])->validated();

    $answer = Answer::create([
        'answer' => $validate_data['answer'],
        'user_id' => auth()->user()->id,
        'question_id' => $id,
    ]);

    auth()->user()->notify(new RepliedToThread($id)); // making new notification

    return back();
}

Then, I created this notification called RepliedToThread.php:

class RepliedToThread extends Notification
{
    use Queueable;

    protected $thread;

    /**
     * Create a new notification instance.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function __construct($id)
    {
        $this->thread = $id;
    }

    /**
     * Get the notification's delivery channels.
     *
     * @param  mixed  $notifiable
     * @return array
     */
    public function via($notifiable)
    {
        return ['database'];
    }

    /**
     * Get the array representation of the notification.
     *
     * @param  mixed  $notifiable
     * @return array
     */
    public function toDatabase($notifiable)
    {
        return [
            'thread' => $this->thread,
            'user' => $notifiable
        ];
    }

    /**
     * Get the array representation of the notification.
     *
     * @param  mixed  $notifiable
     * @return array
     */
    public function toArray($notifiable)
    {
        return [
            //
        ];
    }
}

As you can see I have defined a protected variable called $thread and it is assigned to the $id variable which is comming from: auth()->user()->notify(new RepliedToThread($id));

After that, I tried returning them by:

public function toDatabase($notifiable)
    {
        return [
            'thread' => $this->thread,
            'user' => $notifiable
        ];
    }

And finally, I added this to the blade:

<a href="">
   {{$notification->data['thread']['title']}}</strong>
</a>

But now I get this error:

ErrorException Undefined index: thread

So I don’t really know what is going wrong here! So if you know how to solve this, please let me know, I would really appreciate any idea or suggestion from you guys…

Here is also my table notifications, if you would like to look:

And this is also the result of {{ dd($notification) }} on blade:

Answers:

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Method 1

Basically, your error caused by there’s no ‘thread’ on the other notifications database. how can you prevent that? just add maybe a type to tell the difference notification view, and you need to tell every other notification with a type name for maybe other hasPost, createSome or other.

public function toDatabase($notifiable)
    {
        return [
            'thread' => $this->thread,
            'user' => $notifiable,
            'type' => 'RepliedThread'
        ];
    }

and then in your notification blade you just use if statement to check what type is that

@forelse(auth()->user()->unreadNotifications as $notification)
@if($notification->data['type'] == "RepliedThread")
  <a href="">
   {{$notification->data['thread']['title']}}</strong>
</a>
@endif
@empty
no notification
@endforelse

And for the real-time notification you need to use WebSockets Server, there’s a 3rd party for that and its called Pusher or if you want to use your own WebSocket server, Laravel has Laravel-Websockets. If you dig deeper into that you will find Laravel-Echo

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0