[BUG] Alert Service

[LucasGois1]

What is the bug?

Hello guys, I have an use case where I need to stop my workflow when for example an Email is detected instead just applying the REDACTED message

The detection is working well and I suppose that the alert service is what I need. But, I'm getting no alerts on DefaultAlertService, take a look on my code:

            final var email = new EmailAddress();
            final var emailStrategy = new EmailAddressFilterStrategy();
            emailStrategy.setAlert(true);
            email.setEmailAddressFilterStrategies(List.of(emailStrategy));
            final var identifiers = new Identifiers();
            identifiers.setEmailAddress(email);
            final Policy policy = new Policy();
            policy.setIdentifiers(identifiers);

            final var cache = new InMemoryCache();
            final var alertService = new DefaultAlertService(cache);
            final FilterConfiguration filterConfiguration = new FilterConfiguration.FilterConfigurationBuilder()
                    .withAlertService(alertService)
                    .withAnonymizationService(new AgeAnonymizationService(cache))
                    .build();

            final var emailFilter = new EmailAddressFilter(filterConfiguration, false, false);

            FilterResult result = emailFilter.filter(policy, null, null, 0, candidate, new HashMap<>());

             //  result contains spans about detected emails

             // alert service getAlerts() return empty list
             // cache service also is empty

It's a bug or i'm using wrong?

[LucasGois1]

I have found no documentation about this topic with high details, neither test classes of DefaultAlertService to see the usage

[jzonthemtn]

Hi @LucasGois1, thanks for submitting this. It's very possible there is an issue in the generating of the alert. Your code looks correct.

In Philease 3.0 which was tagged last week, I removed the AlertService. The idea behind it was you could send text through Phileas and then check the alerts for the important information you want alerted on. But, what I ended up seeing was users implemented the alerts outside of Phileas, meaning their system would call Phileas with text and their app would go through the FilterResult and perform an action upon the presence of that information. So, essentially, the alert service was being implemented outside of Phileas.

I agreed that this is likely a better approach because it doesn't try to force users to manage the alerts some way the might not want to. It was also a good reminder for me to keep Phileas focused on its primary task - redacting text - and leave the task of building out stuff around it up to the users.

I'm sorry the alert service has been removed in 3.0.0, but I do encourage you to manage alerts in your app via the contents of the FilterResult.

(I noticed I forgot to remove the alert boolean on the filter strategy and just made a PR https://github.com/philterd/phileas/pull/264/files for it.)