Performance activity notifications

As of Totara 17 performance activity notifications are managed and sent using the centralised notification system. This means that Site Administrators can configure the available performance activity notifications and when and how they are sent site-wide, while other users can configure which notifications are sent by editing a performance activity and going to the Notifications tab.

You can toggle each notification type on, and expand each section to determine which participants will receive the notification. Even once an activity has been activated, you can still change the notification settings.

When choosing who will receive a notification, you may want to consider the needs of each relationship. For example, any relationship set to be a view-only participant may not want to be notified when instances are created, but may want to be notified when they are completed so they can go and view the responses. Another example is that it may be the case that only managers and subjects want to receive notifications about the Completion of subject instance. It is advisable to consider relationships when configuring notifications to avoid sending unnecessary or unwanted notifications. 

Notifications can be triggered for the following performance activity events:

• Completion of subject instance
• Participant due date reminder
• Participant instance completion
• Participant instance created
• Reopened activity
• Participant selection

Participant instance completion is a new notification trigger added in Totara 17 to notify activity participants when a specific participant has completed their participant instance. This trigger event occurs when an activity participant submits a section that also completes their participant instance. This notification lets other participants know when a participant has completed everything for them to complete in the activity. Note that the trigger will also occur when a participant changes their responses and resubmits a section (as this will also recomplete their participant instance). For a single-section activity, this trigger will always occur when a participant submits their section.

If participants in an activity have a single section each, then you can configure a cascade of participant submission notifications, notifying a series of activity participants as each previous participant completes their part in the workflow.

A number of factory notifications are available by default in Totara Perform, which can be enabled or disabled as required.

As with other notifications in the centralised notifications system, you can change or add notification placeholders and multi-language content.

Troubleshooting

Notification logs are a useful tool for troubleshooting your performance activity notifications if you encounter issues. To track down which notifications were sent as part of a performance activities, review the notification logs for that active performance activity. You can identify which notifications have been sent for each notification event, but note that there may be multiple notifications using the same name. 

In some cases, you will have to compare the notification recipient and the activity subject with the notification settings in order to confirm that the behaviour is correct. A common issue is that when notifications are amended, the notification recipient and notification placeholders are mismatched, which results in notifications that do not make sense.