Working with fingerprints

Notification typically accept parameters in the constructor that will be used to determine the message of the notification.

use Illuminate\Notifications\Notification;

class OrderSentNotification extends Notification
{
    public function __construct(
        public Order $order,
    ) {}

To log that a notification was sent for a set of constructor parameters, you can add a fingerprint. A fingerprint is a simple string that will be logged along with the sent notification.

To add a signature to a notification, add a function fingerprint to your notification.

use Illuminate\Notifications\Notification;

class OrderSentNotification extends Notification
{
    public function __construct(
        public Order $order,
    ) {}
    
    public function fingerprint()
    {
        return "order-{$this->order->id}";
    }
}

The fingerprint will be saved in the fingerprint on the log item that is created when the notification is sent.

// returns the fingerprint
Spatie\NotificationLog\Models\NotificationLogItem::first()->fingerprint;

You can use the fingerprint to hunt down notifications using the latestFor method.

// return the latest logged notification for the first order.

$logItem = NotificationLogItem::latestFor($notifiable, fingerprint: "order-1");

When your notification has a lot, or complex, constructor parameters, you could use a hashing function like md5 to generate a value that is unique for those parameters.

use Illuminate\Notifications\Notification;

class OrderSentNotification extends Notification
{
    public function __construct(
        public string $parameter,
        public string $anotherParameter,
        public string $yetAnotherOne,

    ) {}
    
    public function fingerprint()
    {
        return md5("{$this-parameter}-{$this->anotherParameter}-{$yetAnotherOne}";
    }
}