Notify users on mentions in document comments

[thkoch2001]

Current status

• [x] Evaluate filetype/core requirements in https://github.com/CollaboraOnline/online/issues/1529
• [ ] Implement handling of mentions in core
• [ ] Implement some user listing mechanism on the Nextcloud side
• [ ] Implement handling of mentions in online
• [ ] Further steps, parse mentions and pass them over to Nextcloud for notifications

Initial request

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

• As an owner of a document I want to get notified on any comment that gets added to my document in order to provide a timely answer.
• As a commenter of a document I want to be able to mention a person in a comment and thus raise their awareness of an action or input that is needed from their side.
• As a reader of a document I want to be able to subscribe to a document to get informed about all comments to that document.
• As a participant in a comment thread I want to be notified of all updates to all new comments to a comment thread.
• As a participant in a comment thread I want to be notified when the thread gets resolved.

Describe the solution you'd like Destroy any reason to use Google Docs ever again.

Describe alternatives you've considered None.

Additional context https://support.google.com/docs/answer/65129

[juliushaertl]

Other solutions have their own file format but when exporting to a regular office file, the mention is purely identified by the users email address. For the Nextcloud context we'd ideally have the user id or federated cloud id present as some kind of metadata, in order to uniquely identify the mentioned user. We are currently discussion with Collabora how we could store mentions in the comments in the actual file.

[juliushaertl]

Findings so far, ODF does not seem to have any good fit for storing a unique user identifier (like the user id or federated cloud id) within the document, so while we could probably process mentions while being edited in COOL there is no good way we found until now to persist those properly. @kendy is still looking into options from the Collabora side.

[juliushaertl]

@Raudius Noticed that we had this ticket for that and assigned you since we talked about that you would look into that.

[Raudius]

@Raudius Noticed that we had this ticket for that and assigned you since we talked about that you would look into that.

Cool.

One thing to note is that with the current implementation this would only work in the document text (not in the comments). I recall that due to document format reasons getting it to work on comments is a lot more challenging.

[juliushaertl]

Reopening for the remaining task:

• [ ] Listen to the post message for inserted mention and emit a notifcation to the user

[juliushaertl]

Waiting for the Collabora build to finish the remaining bit of implementing a notification to the user.