Filtering

A notification can be filtered (or supressed) using a custom function.

An optional filter in our configuration file, defines the name of a function we provide, also in the configuration file, which accomplishes that.

filter = owntracks_filter()

This specifies that when a message for the defined topic owntracks/jane/phone is processed, our function owntracks_filter() should be invoked to parse that. The filter function should return True if the message should be suppressed, or False if the message should be processed. (As usual, topic names may contain MQTT wildcards.)

The function we define to do that is:

def owntracks_filter(topic, message):
    return message.find('event') == -1

This filter will suppress any messages that do not contain the event token.