Notifications

notification shows up in Home Assistant as a notify entity (MQTT engine, Home Assistant 2024.5 or newer). A message sent to it appears as a Windows notification from the HADA tray icon, titled Home Assistant:

action: notify.send_message
target:
  entity_id: notify.laptop_notification
data:
  message: The washing machine is done.

Title, picture and buttons

Pictures and buttons are new in 1.1.0; 1.0.0 shows the title and the message.

For more than a plain text, publish JSON to the entity's topic instead:

action: mqtt.publish
data:
  topic: hada/laptop/notification/set
  payload: >-
    {
      "title": "Front door",
      "message": "Someone is at the door.",
      "image": "http://homeassistant.local:8123/local/door.jpg",
      "actions": [
        { "action": "open_door", "title": "Open" },
        { "action": "ignore", "title": "Ignore" }
      ]
    }

• title replaces Home Assistant as the heading.
• image is an http or https address of a PNG, JPEG, GIF or BMP of at most 5 MB. The computer fetches it, so it must be reachable from there without signing in. A picture that cannot be fetched is left out; the notification still shows.
• actions become buttons, five at most. action is an ID of your choice (letters, digits, _, -, .), title what the button says.

When a button is pressed, HADA publishes its action to hada/{device}/event/notification_action:

automation:
  - alias: Open the door from the notification
    triggers:
      - trigger: mqtt
        topic: hada/laptop/event/notification_action
        payload: open_door
    actions:
      - action: lock.unlock
        target:
          entity_id: lock.front_door

With several Home Assistants, a press is reported only to the one that sent the notification.

A press is reported only while the tray app that showed the notification is still running. A notification found in the notification centre after the computer was restarted can no longer report its buttons.

Good to know

While Do not disturb is on, Windows puts the notification in the notification centre without showing it. With the WebSocket engine, see WebSocket engine.