Removal of SendingXNotifications in v14

[Matthew-Wise]

I think these notifications have been undervalued and shouldn't be removed in v14. They are quick to make little tweaks to what the back office allows a user to do. In particular SendingContentNotification.

I get the want for Front end/ Back end separation, manipulation the data sent to the front end is really useful. This might be a case of where's my cheese, but would like to at least know why.

discord link - https://discord.com/channels/869656431308189746/1238039395748020275 (will post this link here ofc)

[dawoe]

I just stumbled on this because I am preparing for a upgrade to V14. This will prevent us to do a upgrade.
We use a lot of these notifications in our current V13 project.

Also I think it's very strange this get's removed without any heads up. This is in conflict with Umbraco's own deprication policy :

When we need to remove something from i.e. the public API, we will release a minor version with the deprecation in it, and keep it around for the next major as well (so announced deprecation in 10.2.0 means it will no longer be available in 12.0.0).

See : https://umbraco.com/products/knowledge-center/versioning-and-release-cadence/

Some of the use cases of these events can be found in the code examples of my DF22 talk : https://github.com/dawoe/df22-journey-into-the-unknown/tree/main
But there are more : disabling preview, removing links, setting default property values, making properties readonly.

But what makes it even worse a lot the things removed in this PR (#15855) are still documented.
https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cms/reference/notifications/editormodel-notifications
https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cms/customizing/section-trees/searchable-trees
https://docs.umbraco.com/umbraco-cms/reference/content-delivery-api/additional-preview-environments-support#configuring-custom-preview-urls

And as it seems there is no alternative.

[nielslyngsoe]

Hi @dawoe thanks for sharing some of your use cases. I would be happy if you could list all use cases you can come up with, then I will make sure we consider those use cases.

Regarding 'Disabling Preview' and 'making properties readonly' then I would assume you rather like proper User Permissions to solve this? — Maybe you can let me in on those, cause using SendingNotifications sounds like a hack for those missing features?

Can I ask you to elaborate on what you mean by 'Removing Links' — Links can be many things, so please let me in on the context.

Regarding UI customizations then v.15 brings new ways to remove buttons or set up additional rules for when they should be shown. This could be a whole section on the Documentation on its own, but for now you can read about it in the API Docs:

Append conditions to an extension:
https://apidocs.umbraco.com/v15/ui-api/classes/libs_extension_api.UmbExtensionRegistry.html#appendCondition

Exclude an extension:
https://apidocs.umbraco.com/v15/ui-api/classes/libs_extension_api.UmbExtensionRegistry.html#exclude

Looking forward to hear from you

[Luuk1983]

oof, this sucks! I'm preparing to update a number of our packages to Umbraco 15 and we have quite some logic to manipulates the menu's in Umbraco. I don't mind if this logic needs to go somewhere else, but it seems that there is currently no alternative...? I understand the need to rework the backoffice and I think it's a very good step towards the future, but tbh, as a company, it's a complete pain in the butt.

[nielslyngsoe]

Hi @Luuk1983 Could you let me in on what type of menu manipulations you are doing? Thanks in advance

[Luuk1983]

@nielslyngsoe Ofcourse! We use these notifications to make sure the client doesn't not do things that could break the frontend.

We use the MenuRenderingNotification to remove the delete button on content that should not be removed. Think of the 404 page or the homepage. If the user is an administrator, we don't remove the delete button but modify it with a different icon to make sure the administrator understands that he or she needs to be really sure before deleting that node. Yes I know that you could achieve this with user rights, but to be honest, the rights and roles system in Umbraco is so incredibly unflexible, so this works way better.

Next to that we use the SendingAllowedChildrenNotification to also enforce content rules. For instance, we allow only one 404-page content type to be present on the site, so when a 404-page is already present, we remove the option to insert it from the allowed children. Or sometimes we want a editor only to be ablee to add a maximum number of children of a certain type and we also enforce that using these rules.

So in short, it's to define business rules when it comes to content. If you need more in-depth information or code examples, let me know!

[lumimario]

I came across this problem while creating a new package for Umbraco. I can't move forward if there's no alternative for this. And I know many other packages that use these notifications to make changes to the backoffice.

We're already in v15 and it's definitely not ready for production unless you just want a simple site.

[nielslyngsoe]

Hi @lumimario I would like to know about your use case. Because the Sending Notifications can be used for many different things. I would like to ask if you could you let me in on your needs for this? Especially what is it you like to achieve. Thanks

[lrirlu]

While I haven’t used SendingContentNotification directly, I had been exploring its use for a now seemingly unsupported scenario. After all the v15 documentation still references editor model notifications, which adds to the confusion.

Here’s the use case I was working on:
I have a document type with properties that define its "state," specifically:

• startDate
• endDate
• publish-status

The content is "Active" if published and the current time is between startDate and endDate; otherwise, it’s "Inactive."

My goal was to compute this state as a readonly property in order to:

• Clarify content status for editors: Reduce confusion and save overhead by showing a transparent, calculated "Active/Inactive" state during editing.
• Enable sorting by state in list views: Especially when parent content has list-view enabled, sorting children by computed state would add significant value.
  Previously, I was exploring SendingContentNotification as a hook to dynamically calculate and populate this information. However, with its deprecation, I’m uncertain about the best approach moving forward.

Are there alternative patterns, workflows, or extension points in v15 that would support this type of dynamic computation and communication to editors? Any guidance or clarification would be much appreciated.

I’m still relatively new to Umbraco, so I may have overlooked an obvious approach.