Room avatars are broken on email notifications

[matrixbot]

Submitted by @​matthew:matrix.org

(Imported from https://matrix.org/jira/browse/SYN-695)

Relevant code

• synapse/res/templates/room.html#L4-L14

[MadLittleMods]

Unsure in which exact way they were broken before but this looks to still be the case and still reproducible going back to "Riot notifications".

The room avatars are just colored circles. The user avatars work just fine although I have blurred them out in the image.

From the relevant code, synapse/res/templates/room.html#L4-L14, it appears like room.avatar_url isn't being serialized in or passed in to be used in the template.

[DMRobertson]

Took a quick look at this out of curiosity. Looks like we'd need to provide an "avatar_url" key in the dict returned from synapse.push.mailer.Mailer._get_room_vars. Wrote a quick unit test to try and reproduce the error, but I'm having trouble with trial. Will chase down when I next get chance.

[clokep]

Took a quick look at this out of curiosity. Looks like we'd need to provide an "avatar_url" key in the dict returned from synapse.push.mailer.Mailer._get_room_vars.

That sounds about the right spot to do this! Probably around:

synapse/synapse/push/mailer.py

Lines 359 to 365 in 0c3565d

	room_vars: Dict[str, Any] = {
	"title": room_name,
	"hash": string_ordinal_total(room_id), # See sender avatar hash
	"notifs": [],
	"invite": is_invite,
	"link": self._make_room_link(room_id),
	}

We probably just need to check room_state_ids for a m.room.avatar event and pull some info out.

[DMRobertson]

Room for improvement here:

• Groups and users without avatars get a "placeholder" avatar which is just a coloured circle. This doesn't seem to correspond to the colour of the circle seen in element
• That circle doesn't have the letter like it does in element

Not quite clear on where the boundary between Matrix and Element is here. But it could look nicer.

[MadLittleMods]

Thanks for fixing this up @DMRobertson 🦓