Notifications

Dialogs

When working in dialog, instead of checking the validity of the input when the OK button is pressed and notifying the user about invalid data with a modal dialog, the recommended approach is to use DialogWrapper.doValidate(), which was described previously.

Editor Hints

For actions invoked from the editor (such as refactorings, navigation actions and different code insight features), the best way to notify the user about the inability to perform an action is to use the HintManager class. Its method showErrorHint() displays a floating popup above the editor which is automatically hidden when the user starts performing another action in the editor. Other HintManager methods can be used for displaying other kinds of non-modal notification hints over an editor.

Editor Banner

For UI reference, see Banner in the IntelliJ Platform UI Guidelines.

Notifications that appear at the top of the file editor are a great way to ask the user to take an important action that would otherwise impede their experience if ignored (e.g., missing SDK, setup/project configuration requiring user input).

Register an implementation of EditorNotifications.Provider using com.intellij.editorNotificationProvider extension point. If no index access is required, it can implement DumbAware to be shown during indexing.

A commonly used UI implementation is EditorNotificationPanel.

"Got It" Notification

Use to highlight important new/changed features via GotItMessage. See Got It tooltip in IntelliJ Platform UI Guidelines for an overview.

Top-Level Notifications (Balloons)

The most general way to display non-modal notifications is to use the Notifications class.

It has two main advantages:

• The user can control the way each notification type is displayed under

• All displayed notifications are gathered in the Event Log tool window and can be reviewed later

For UI reference, see Balloon in the IntelliJ Platform UI Guidelines.

The specific method used to display a notification is Notifications.Bus.notify(). If the current Project is known, please use overload with Project parameter, so the notification is shown in its associated frame.

The text of the notification can include HTML tags.

Use Notification.addAction(AnAction) to add links below the content, use NotificationAction for convenience.

The groupId parameter of the Notification constructor specifies a notification type. The user can choose the display type corresponding to each notification type under .

To specify the preferred display type, you need to use NotificationGroup to create notifications.

Please see the following steps for setup, depending on the target platform version.

<extensions defaultExtensionNs="com.intellij">
  <notificationGroup id="Custom Notification Group"
                     displayType="BALLOON"
                     key="notification.group.name"/>
</extensions>

public class MyNotifier {

  public static void notifyError(@Nullable Project project,
                                 String content) {
    NotificationGroupManager.getInstance()
            .getNotificationGroup("Custom Notification Group")
            .createNotification(content, NotificationType.ERROR)
            .notify(project);
  }

}

public class MyNotifier {

  private static final NotificationGroup NOTIFICATION_GROUP =
          new NotificationGroup("Custom Notification Group", NotificationDisplayType.BALLOON, true);

  public static void notifyError(@Nullable Project project, String content) {
    NOTIFICATION_GROUP.createNotification(content, NotificationType.ERROR)
            .notify(project);
  }

}