Web Notification API onclick

I’ve covered before that the browser Notification API lets you display desktop notifications like this:

Notification.requestPermission(perm =>
  navigator.serviceWorker.ready.then(reg => reg.showNotification("HEY!!")));

And when I click that notification ... nothing happens. Actually, something does happen: a Chrome window focuses. An arbitrary Chrome window. This is not what I want.

We want to supply a callback for notification clicks. This is yet another service worker event type! This time, it’s onnotificationclick. Drop this in your service worker:

self.addEventListener("notificationclick", (ev) => {
  console.log("Notification clicked!");
});

Now when you click the notification, the console logs that line. Now more useful: I would like notification clicks to open a webpage. This can be done with clients.openWindow:

self.addEventListener("notificationclick", (ev) => {
  clients.openWindow("https://jameshfisher.com/");
});

Tagged . All content copyright James Fisher 2017. This post is not associated with my employer. Found an error? Edit this page.