I am not a developer as much as i am a project manager, i need to know more if the following is possible to help me decide the future of a project.
mainly my question is, can i trigger a certain method (function) in my application using the push notification ? so my app might be in the background (or not) and i want to send a push notification message that wakes the application and execute some piece of code.
if the answer is yes, can this be done without the user interaction ? so i mean without the user clicking on the push message ? to be some kind of automated, so i send the Push notification message, the iPhone receives it and execute the code, without the use interaction ?
i can set up my own APNS server if needed.
i am not looking for a code as much as i am looking for an answer if this can be done or not.
Thanks,
Yes, this is possible, as long as the user clicks on the notification. This could be done either with local notifications, or push notifications.
When an application is launched in response to a notification, the AppDelegate method application:didFinishLaunchingWithOptions: will have an option indicating the notification that precipitated the launch.
It cannot, to my knowledge, be achieved without user interaction.
Related
On iOS5, the push notification shows on the top bar and not block user. When the push notification is showing and user click our application but not the push bar, our app will launch normally. However, we want to cancel the push notification at that time. Is it possible ? Thanks a lot!
Short answer: No. There is no way you can manipulate sent notifications as far as I know.
Slightly longer answer:
Once a push request has been sent to the Apple Push Notification servers, thats it. It disappears into their system and they will then try to deliver it on a 'best effort' basis. You receive no feedback about its status or any ability to change/delete it.
The only form of feedback you can get is about which devices do not wish to receive push notifications that you tried to send to.
If you want to send delayed notifications which can be cancelled/modified at later data, either write you own solution, or use some pre-existing solution (e.g Urban Airship).
Is it possible to tell user what were about recently received push notifications ? I mean, if user clicks cancel when push was received, there is a badge on the icon of my application, but that's all. I think this is not user friendly and such notifications have no sense. When user opens an application, he knows that there is something new in it, but don't know exactly what. Do I need to make some requests to my web server to have information about my last pushes or I'm missing something and there is another way ?
From the implementations of push notifications I've worked with so far, you'll need to make a call to your server when the app actually starts up in order for the app to know what the new information is. I don't believe there's any way to store received push notifications unless your app is opened and handling them in the app delegate. Otherwise if push notification is closed it's discarded.
In all the apps I've worked with that utilized push notifications there was a place in the app where all the recent notifications were displayed after a call to the server was made to get the whole list.
I have implemented all recommended methods in AppDelegate to get working Remote Notifications service.
I can accept them while running, while launching and while turned off.
But there is an issue, since I can't work with many received notifications while in background. I can work only with latest notification.
What is recommended manual to do that? How can I got all notifications received while in background? Is it only solvable via manual call to my service provider (sender of apns data)?
With all the projects I've worked on there hasn't been a way to locally store this information if the push notification is dismissed. In all those cases we used a small file on the server that the app would connect to and pull when it became active again. There was also some place in the app where the user could see all their notifications which, again, were stored on the server for quick retrieval.
With the way I understand push notifications to be setup, if the notification is dismissed the system discards it. It'll perform anything it's supposed to do (such as update the badge number and play the correct sound) but any additional information specific to that notification is lost.
Not sure if this helps, but if you just want to know how many notifications you have missed while you were in background. You can create a variable which contains notification number and store this in the app every time you handle notification. When you come out of background and receive a new notification you can subtract the new number with the stored number to find out the number of missed notifications. I don't think there is a way where iOS can give you complete data associated with all the notification device have received while the app was in background.
The best solution is to keep a list of sent notifications with all relevant data on your server, so the app can access that data when it launches. Sending multiple notifications with data that is not stored on the server can be risky, because the application only receives the notification when the user opens the app from that notification, so if they tap on one notification, the app will only every receive that one.
If you have them all in a list on your server, the app can simply go and pull that list down, and process it, making sure no data is lost.
I am implementing a push notification functionality for my app and everything is running smoothly except for one case.
The situation is this:
When the app is off (not running in background either) and the user receives a push notification. The user hits "Close" and then later on decides to go to the app. I would like my app delegate to know the push notification that was received earlier however, I don't know how to check that. I know that I can have a function call in my didLaunch... but that works when the user decides to hit the "View" button instead of "Close".
Any hints?
Thanks!
Really, the answer is don't bother. You can never guarantee that the alert was received, so unfortunately you'll run into problems later if you rely on this. apns doesn't guarantee a device will receive a payload.
I am building an app that uses the fine Urban Airship api to send the user push notifications.
The app keeps track of event dates that are added to the app by the user.
This means I have no server in place for dealing with push, the app itself simply
schedules a push notification with Urban AS when the user add the event date and time.
If the user decides to delete the event before it occurs I un-schedule it with Urban AS. All is good. I, however, would like to not send notifications to a user that has disabled notifications as these notifications are no free:)
I know the Push Notification API from Apple makes sure the user will not receive any notification if they turned them off in settings. They will simply ignore the scheduled notifications Urban AS sends, which is a waste of bandwidth and money.
How can I tell if the user has disabled the notification for my app?
Also, I see no other option than to test if the user has turned off notification and then tell Urban AS to cancel all notifications and if the user turns them back on, I will have to go through all events and re-scheduled them :/ each time the app runs.
Can anyone think of a way for me not to have to fill up my appDelegate with all kinds of conditional code for testing these scenarios? e.g. user has turned off push since last running the app, user has turned them on since last time. I am also concerned if the user will understand this behavior?
Guess I am just asking for a bit of best practice with this push / Urban Airship setup:)
Thanks.
As I see it, [[UIApplication sharedApplication] enabledRemoteNotificationTypes] will return the notification types the user has currently enabled for your app.
Otherwise, you are correct. You have to call this method on every app launch and, in the case that the user has reenabled notifications, reschedule all events that you had formerly deleted.
As to the question of filling up your app delegate with all kinds of conditionals, you might want to write a separate PushNotificationsController (not a UIViewController, just a NSObject subclass) that will handle all push-related stuff.