Custom Notification Type Design

Custom Notification Type Design

A Custom Notification Type is the definition of a notification: its label, its API name, and which delivery channels it is allowed to use. It is not the send. Designing one badly is cheap, invisible, and permanent — the notification still "works" in the sense that send() returns without an exception, and the user still never sees it, or sees it forty times a day and mutes the whole channel.

Two failure shapes dominate, and they need opposite fixes:

Scope. This skill owns the design and governance decisions: which channels a type should declare, who should receive it, how often, what the deep link opens, and how the org keeps the set of notification types from sprawling. The mechanics of the send — Messaging.CustomNotification, the Flow customNotificationAction, the 500-value recipient cap, bulk send patterns — belong to admin/custom-notification-types. Those appear below only where they constrain a design choice. Email alerts are admin/email-templates-and-alerts.

Before Starting

1. Name the action the recipient will take. If the honest answer is "be aware", this is a report subscription, a dashboard, or a Chatter post — not a notification. Write the action down; it becomes the review criterion later.

2. Decide who cannot act. Notifications to people without permission to do the thing are the fastest route to mute. The recipient set is the design, not an afterthought.

3. Find out whether the org already has a type that covers this. A custom notification type is org-wide and cheap to create, which is exactly why orgs accumulate dozens of near-duplicates that fragment the user's mental model.

4. Establish the channel budget. Bell and desktop are one checkbox (desktop); mobile push is a separate one (mobile). Slack is a separate notification type entirely — see below. Every channel you enable is a channel you have to justify at review.

Core Concepts

The delivery chain has four independent gates

A notification reaches a human only if all four of these are open. Three of them are outside the sending code, which is why "the Apex ran and nobody got anything" is the single most common support ticket in this area.

1. Type definition        CustomNotificationType.desktop / .mobile
                          (Setup → Notification Builder → Notification Types)
        ↓
2. Org delivery settings  NotificationTypeConfig → notificationChannels
                          { desktopEnabled, mobileEnabled, slackEnabled }
                          and appSettings → { connectedAppName, enabled }
                          (Setup → Notification Delivery Settings)
        ↓
3. User preference        The recipient's own notification settings
        ↓
4. Device / browser       Mobile app installed with push permission granted;
                          browser notification permission granted

Gate 2 is the one nobody remembers. NotificationTypeConfig carries an appSettings array of { connectedAppName, enabled } — per connected app. Mobile push does not reach a device because "mobile is checked on the type"; it reaches a device because a connected app (the Salesforce mobile app, a Field Service app, a branded app built with the Mobile SDK) is enabled for that notification type in Notification Delivery Settings. A new notification type plus an untouched delivery setting is a notification that silently goes nowhere on mobile.

The two metadata types, and why deployment surprises people

They deploy separately. A change set or package that carries the type but not the config moves the definition and leaves the delivery settings at whatever the target org already had — which for a brand-new type is "nothing enabled for any connected app". Treat the pair as one deployable unit.

slack on the type is not the Slack feature

CustomNotificationType has a slack field. The Metadata API Developer Guide describes it as "Reserved for future use." Do not check it, do not reverse-engineer meaning from it, and do not conclude from it that Salesforce cannot notify Slack — it can.

The real Slack path is a separate notification type, created through Notification Builder's Slack flow ("Create a Slack Notification"), which binds the notification to a Slack app and a Slack message configuration and is sent by a Send Notification action. Independently, NotificationTypeConfig → notificationChannels does carry a real slackEnabled boolean, so Slack is a first-class delivery channel at the org-settings layer. Design Slack as its own type with its own audience and its own review — not as a fourth checkbox on the desktop/mobile type.

Recipient resolution is polymorphic, and that is a design lever

The Flow action's recipientIds input is documented as accepting several ID kinds, each of which fans out differently:

"Values can be combined in a list up to 500 values." That is a cap on the number of IDs you pass, not on the number of humans reached — one GroupId can be hundreds of people. Design the recipient expression at the ID level: passing one queue ID is both cheaper and more maintainable than resolving 200 user IDs in Flow, and it stays correct when queue membership changes.

The design consequence: prefer a group or queue ID over an enumerated user list, because membership then has an owner and a maintenance path. An explicit user list is a snapshot that starts rotting the day it ships.

Deep links: targetId versus targetPageRef

Exactly one of the two is required. targetId is a record ID and is the right answer for anything record-shaped — the platform resolves it to the record home on every surface, so the same notification works on desktop and in the mobile app without you writing a URL.

targetPageRef takes a serialized PageReference and is the escape hatch for non-record destinations (a tab, a custom component page, an external URL). It is strictly more work and strictly more fragile: you are now maintaining a navigation contract by hand.

Hand-built /lightning/r/... URLs are the worst of both. They are Lightning-only strings that bypass the platform's own navigation resolution, and they hardcode an assumption about which app the recipient is in.

Actionable mobile notifications (action groups, Beta)

CustomNotificationType supports an actionGroups array — labelled Beta in the Metadata API Developer Guide — which lets a mobile push carry buttons the user can press without opening the record. Each action has an actionLabel, actionName, an actionType of either NotificationApiAction or Share, and for NotificationApiAction an actionTarget naming the Apex class that implements it. Apex selects the group at send time with setActionGroupId(...).

This is the one lever that genuinely raises mobile notification value rather than just its volume: "Approve / Reject" in the notification shade is a different product from "tap to open a record and hunt for the button". Being Beta, it is a design option to evaluate, not to assume, and it is worth confirming current status before committing a roadmap to it.

Common Patterns

Pattern A — one type per audience contract, not per feature

Create a notification type for a class of interruption a user can reason about ("Case escalation", "Approval needed"), not for each Flow that wants to send something. Users tune preferences per type, so a type is the unit of consent. Ten types with clear names beat forty named after the projects that shipped them.

Pattern B — the throttle lives on the record, not in the sender

A Last_Notified_At__c datetime plus a Notification_Count_Today__c on the subject record makes suppression a data question rather than a code question, survives across Flow and Apex senders, and is queryable when someone asks "why did this fire six times". Detail in references/examples.md, Example 3.

Pattern C — digest for anything that is not time-critical

A scheduled job that sends one notification listing N items, deep-linked to a list view or a report, converts N interruptions into one. This is the single highest-leverage design move available and it is almost never taken, because per-event notification is what the requirement literally said.

Pattern D — registry as custom metadata, not as a wiki page

A Notification_Registry__mdt record per type — owner, trigger, intended recipient action, channels, review date — deploys with the org, is readable from Apex with getAll() at no SOQL cost, and can be asserted on in a test. A spreadsheet cannot.

Pattern E — separate the "urgent" type from the "informational" type

If one type carries both, users have exactly two options: mute everything or tolerate everything. Splitting by urgency lets a user keep the pager and silence the newsletter, which is what they wanted the whole time.

Decision Guidance

Recommended Workflow

1. Write the recipient's action in one sentence. "The on-call agent reassigns the case." If you cannot write it, stop — the requirement is reporting, not notification, and building it as a notification will make the org's real notifications less effective.
2. Choose the audience as an ID expression, preferring a queue or public group ID over enumerated users, and record which prerequisite each ID kind needs (account teams enabled, team selling enabled) so the design is reproducible in another org.
3. Declare the minimum channels on the type — desktop first, mobile only when the action is time-critical — and design Slack, if needed, as its own notification type rather than a channel on this one.
4. Configure and deploy NotificationTypeConfig alongside the type, naming each connected app that must be enabled. Verify on a real device, not in the browser: gates 2 and 4 fail silently and independently.
5. Design the deep link as targetId where the destination is a record, and only fall back to targetPageRef for non-record destinations. Never build a raw Lightning URL.
6. Specify the throttle before the first send — minimum interval per record, daily cap per user, and what happens to suppressed events (dropped, or rolled into a digest).
7. Register the type with owner, intended action, channels, and a review date, and define what "working" will be measured by so the quarterly review has evidence instead of opinions.

Review Checklist

• The recipient's action is written down and the recipient has permission to do it
• Audience is expressed as group/queue IDs where possible, not enumerated users
• Prerequisites for the chosen ID kinds are recorded (account teams, team selling)
• mobile is enabled only where the action is time-critical
• NotificationTypeConfig is part of the same deployable unit as the type
• Every connected app that must deliver this type is enabled in delivery settings
• Delivery verified end-to-end on a real mobile device, not just desktop
• slack is unchecked on the CustomNotificationType; Slack has its own type if needed
• Deep link uses targetId for record destinations
• Title fits within 250 characters and body within 750 after merge fields resolve
• Throttle interval and daily cap are specified, and suppressed events have a defined fate
• A digest alternative was explicitly considered and rejected with a reason
• Registry entry exists with owner, intended action, and review date
• Success metric is defined and instrumented before launch
• Notification body leaks no field the recipient may not have access to

Salesforce-Specific Gotchas

Full detail in references/gotchas.md.

1. Four independent delivery gates, three of them outside your code.
2. NotificationTypeConfig does not travel with the type unless you deploy it.
3. Mobile push needs the connected app enabled for that notification type.
4. slack on CustomNotificationType is "Reserved for future use" — Slack is a separate type.
5. 500 is a cap on IDs passed, not on humans reached.
6. AccountId and OpportunityId recipients need teams enabled or they resolve to nobody.
7. Title 250 / body 750 — merge fields make this a runtime property, not a design-time one.
8. WITH USER_MODE on the type lookup turns a missing permission into a query that returns no rows.
9. Notification actions are rate-limited org-wide, so one bulk job can starve every other notification.
10. Inactive users silently drop out of every recipient expression.
11. The bell has no acknowledgement; delivery is not readership, and neither is measurable without instrumentation you add.

Output Artifacts

Related Skills

• admin/custom-notification-types — the send itself: Messaging.CustomNotification, the Flow action, the 500-value recipient cap, bulk send patterns. Read it when you are writing the sender rather than deciding what the notification should be.
• admin/chatter-notification-tuning — the other org-wide notification surface competing for the same attention budget
• admin/email-templates-and-alerts — the channel to route non-urgent content to instead of adding another push
• admin/approval-processes — the most common legitimate source of an actionable notification, and the one where action groups pay off most
• admin/permission-sets-vs-profiles — the access model that decides whether a recipient can act on what you notified them about