I'm making a simple app in swift, and have users, photos, and friends table in Postgres and store photos in S3. The app functions with simple REST calls. I'm having an issue with the following:
User A sends a friend request to User B
Friend Table: sender_id: UserA_id, receiver_id: UserB_id, status: 'pending'
Now, on the device, UserB is added to UserA's pendingFromMe's friends. Now, how at the same time do I update UserB's pendingToMe's friends on a separate device?
A couple options I have thought of
Postgres Listen - This is bad as 500 connection limit means this won't work
APN would send a Push Notification to UserB and run a function to re-download friends list
Any other options? How would I go about doing this? There are NO tutorials outside of Parse/Firebase and I don't want to use BaaS since I've built my own REST server.
Thanks!
Will accept links to tutorials for this, github repos, etc
If you orchestrate, your facade should call your user service to update the status on both users then invoke the notification service to push to both devices.
If you're event-based, your user service should probably listen to status update events and update the other user's status then fire an event which your notification service should handle to push to the involved devices.
Related
I have a backend running GraphQL, MongoDB + Mongoose, and Apollo. This application has functionality for user accounts and a friends list. Each user can login to their account and see a list of friends with their current 'status'; If a friend changes their status, I need that change to be reflected on the user's side. An example of this is like facebook's "green dot" on messenger that tells you when one of your friends is online using the application.
I have been searching documentation for GraphQL and have been suggested either Subscriptions or Live Queries. Subscriptions seem to be the majority of suggestions from what I understand, live queries are not officially part of GraphQL or were dropped.
Does anyone have a solution to getting "live" data with GraphQL/MongoDB that doesn't involve polling for this scenario?
You already seem to have your answer: subscriptions!
Using your example, consider two users - mikep17 and mcy. You are mikep17, logged into your application and viewing your list of friends and their statuses. I am your friend, and I log in as you are viewing this list, and you want to see that in your application's UI.
On the frontend, in your application's instance, your application will execute a subscription to some event. Let's call it friendStatusChange. Now your application is "listening" for that event in order to respond accordingly. Let's assume that when your application receives the event, it can parse out the information that "I" (mcy) have changed from offline => online and then use that to add the "green dot" next to my username.
On the backend, your GraphQL server will have code that handles your user functionality - logging in, logging out, etc. It will need to be enhanced to hook into these actions and "publish" the friendStatusChange event as applicable.
Now, instead of your client constantly asking (polling) "did a friend's status change? how about now? now?", it can just listen and wait for your server to tap it on the shoulder and say "hey buddy, your friend mcy's status changed".
SWIFT 3 / Firebase
app like instagram/Facebook
Notifications
I am working on letting users know when another user e.g. liked their post, made a friend request etc.
I set up everything for cloud messaging with firebase and can send bulk messages at all my devices.
Now I want to introduce notifications which contain the current user, the user who did the action and what happened.
Unfortunately I did not find anything about this despite the general implementing of firebase cloud messaging.
My questions are:
1: Do i have to structure a database (e.g. .child("notifications").child(userId).... ?
2: How do I get the token from the stranger user I address with the notification?
3: How can I make the input variable?
I am happy about all kinds of help!
I need a little help with understanding what to look for when selecting a service to use for allowing my application's users to create accounts and send push notifications to each other. I do not have any backend service experience, except for with Parse, and I don't understand some of the functionality requirements.
I want users to be able to register an account and add other users. Then, I would like the users to be able to select specific users from their "friends" list in order to send a push notification to each selected user for a meeting. However, I honestly don't even know where to start.
It seems that many of the services that I have looked at are set up for sending targeted push notifications to groups of users from a dashboard (seemingly for marketing and other purposes).
I am completely new to servers and backends, except for a little activity with Parse, so can anyone recommend a direction for me to take for integrating such functionality in an iOS application that I am working on?
You can use mbaas providers like built.io backend, It provides push notification functionality on object creation event, and a set of ACL can be specified on these objects. This will act as a filter criteria as to who are the allowed to receive this push notification.
You can refer to their docs here https://docs.built.io
I am creating an app using Swift and Parse as my backend platform. In my application a User can send an invitation to be connected to another user and as soon as they are connected the app should send notifications to remind the user about his friend’s birthday.
In this scenario I have two moments in which the app should send a notification:
1- When user A sends an invitation to user B, user B should receive a notification
2- When it’s user’s B birthday, user A should receive a notification and vice versa
I created a Parse object called AppNotification that is responsible for storing information about the notifications the user should receive. So when a user sends an invitation to another user I am adding a line in the AppNotification table, the same happens when it’s a birthday of a friend. Using this I can calculate the number of unread notifications and show it to the user in the UI using the components badge.
My question is more related to the best way to send the birthday notification. What I am considering is:
1- When user A sends and invitation to user B I have to send a push notification to user B.
2- As soon as the users are connected I can schedule local notifications to remind them about the birthday. This solution would use Local Notifications instead of Push Notifications.
3- Or create a Job in Parse that will be executed every day and will read all the users whose birthday is today and send a push notification to his friends. This solution would use Push notifications and I would not need to worry about scheduling local notifications.
Between the points 2 and 3 which one is the best solution? Is there any other approach I could use? When should I consider using Local Notifications other than Remote Notifications?
Thank you in advance.
Regarding points 2 and 3: there are pros and cons for both options: Having the reminders as local notifications is basically what your local calendar app does, i.e. you don't need a connection the Internet / Parse. However: what happens if one party (A) decides that she no longer wants to be a "friend" (of B)? Should notifications still be sent? If not, you could easily delete the scheduled notification on the server. This would also ensure that the other party (B) wouldn't receive notifications of a former friend (A) if she didn't open the app in the meantime and synced the list of friends.
There are of course more pros and cons, so it is really a matter of your preference and possibly other constraints (e.g. should an active internet connection be necessity?).
This is the first time that I approach the push notification service and I'm little bit confused. I 'd like to have just some conceptual help, not code.
I need to build an app that should receive and register for different kind of notifications. For instance in my app I'd like that users could register for PROMO notifications category and NEWS notifications category, I'd like that they could choose which one they want to be notified.
Reading the Apple doc, that was not so clear to me, it seems that once the app device is registered I receive just one token and seems impossible to receive more tokens for different kind of registration(NEWS and PROMO for instance), because the token is related to the app and the device. Is that correct?
The other thing that is not so clear to me is, if a device is registered for a specific notification is it possible to send the notification only to a set o devices?
If nothing of that is offered by Apple Push services do you think that is possible to manage everything like that:
-I register the app device for notification if (PROMO || NEWS) are selected
-I get the token
-I send the token to my server giving also as additional info about the service which the user wants to subscribe
-The server (provider) register the token and the kind of subscription (PROMO || NEWS)
-Later when I have a notification to push I ask the server all the tokens registered for that specific category and then I send the notification only to those devices registered for that category.
Thanks for helping me out I'm really confused.
"Reading the Apple doc, that was not so clear to me, it seems that once the app device is registered I receive just one token and seems impossible to receive more tokens for different kind of registration(NEWS and PROMO for instance), because the token is related to the app and the device. Is that correct?"
YES
The other thing that is not so clear to me is, if a device is registered for a specific notification is it possible to send the notification only to a set o devices?
YES, you need a DB where you connect a Push Token with the related Services (promo | news). If you have a new Promo Push Message you send the message to all related token. on the app site, everytime the user change the categorie (promo / news) you should prpvide these infos to your service with the push token.
These are all problems that you have to solve yourself on the server side. The push service simply provides a means to send a single message to a single device. You have to figure out yourself which messages you want to send to which devices. Each message has to be sent individually, there's no way to "broadcast" a message to all your users directly.
You could think of the push tokens as email addresses – of course, one email address might be subscribed to different newsletters from the same publisher, but it's the publisher's job (yours) to figure out whom to send which newsletters, not the email provider's (Apple's).
You should think of the push notification registration like my I send the user push notifications. Not what kind of push notification can I send the user.
Then you need to do serverside filtering on you categories, like the ones in your example promo and news.
The perferance of the user should be stored on your server, so you will know what kind of notification to send to which user.