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Notifications

Notifications

One of the leading design principles in recent versions of IntelliJ IDEA is avoiding the use of modal message boxes for notifying the user about errors and other situations that may warrant the user's attention. As a replacement, the IntelliJ Platform provides multiple non-modal notification UI options.

Dialogs

When working in a modal dialog, instead of checking the validity of the input when the OK button is pressed and notifying the user about invalid data with a modal dialog, the recommended approach is to use DialogBuilder.doValidate(), which was described previously.

Editor Hints

For actions invoked from the editor (such as refactorings, navigation actions and different code insight features), the best way to notify the user about the inability to perform an action is to use the HintManager class. Its method showErrorHint() displays a floating popup above the editor which is automatically hidden when the user starts performing another action in the editor. Other HintManager methods can be used for displaying other kinds of non-modal notification hints over an editor.

Top-Level Notifications

The most general way to display non-modal notifications is to use the Notifications class.

It has two main advantages:

  • The user can control the way each notification type is displayed under Settings | Notifications

  • All displayed notifications are gathered in the Event Log toolwindow and can be reviewed later

The specific method used to display a notification is Notifications.Bus.notify(). The text of the notification can include HTML tags. You can allow the user to interact with the notification by including hyperlink tags in the notification text and passing a NotificationListener instance to the constructor of the Notification class.

The groupDisplayId parameter of the Notification constructor specifies a notification type. The user can choose the display type corresponding to each notification type under Settings | Notifications. To specify the preferred display type, you need to call Notifications.Bus.register() before displaying any notifications.