macos - Remove application from Notification Center

Question

Hey I was playing around with making a small cocoa application and using the new Notification Center API in Mountain Lion. However my app is now present in the notification center settings, together with Calendar, Messages and so on.

As it was just me playing around I want it to disappear from the list now, but I cannot find anyway to remove it, tried several things, dragging it out, holding alt+right click and so on. Does anyone know where the (probably a) plist that populates that list could be located?

Answer 1

I was stuck in the same boat.

While I don't believe purging applications from Notification Center that have once registered is a documented step, there's clearly some stuff setup to do that. Here's what I found out. This data isn't stored in a plist but rather a sqlite database.

If you look ~/Library/Application Support/NotificationCenter/<id> (in my case, I only had one directory under NotificationCenter), you'll see an <id>.db file under the directory.

^{Editor's note: Hofi points out that since macOS 10.10 said SQLite database can be found in the directory returned by shell command
$(getconf DARWIN_USER_DIR)com.apple.notificationcenter/db, named just db.}

Poking inside, I see tables like app_info, app_source, presented_notifications, etc. Furthermore, the schema includes a clean-up trigger that looks like this:

CREATE TRIGGER app_deleted AFTER DELETE ON app_info
BEGIN
    DELETE FROM scheduled_notifications     WHERE app_id=old.app_id;
    DELETE FROM presented_notifications     WHERE app_id=old.app_id;
    DELETE FROM presented_alerts                WHERE app_id=old.app_id;
    DELETE FROM notifications                   WHERE app_id=old.app_id;
    DELETE FROM app_push                        WHERE app_id=old.app_id;
    DELETE FROM app_loc                     WHERE app_id=old.app_id;
     DELETE FROM app_source                 WHERE app_id=old.app_id;
END;

Using a sqlite3 client, if you do a

select * from app_info;

the first column is the app_id of your application, the second column is your app's bundleid. Find your application based on the bundleid. Then do a

delete from app_info where app_id = <app_id>

where is the correct app_id you found using your select command above.

What was frustrating was that after doing this, everything stayed around in NotificationCenter (both the center and System Preferences). I had to logout and log back in to see the changes take effect, but luckily, my multiple test apps are now gone ;-)

If anyone knows of a less convoluted way, I'm all ears.