For sending and receiving push notifications I want to register all my apps to the push channel with:
var channel = await PushNotificationChannelManager.CreatePushNotificationChannelForApplicationAsync();
I can now send and recieve pushes over this channel.
The problem is that this channel is only valid for one app. If I install the same app on another device I only receive the message on the same device as I sent it.
How can I push the notification to all my devices?
The push channel is unique for each app installation. You can only use it to send a push to this one installation. If you want to send push to all the devices running your app, you have to collect the push channel info somewhere (your server, etc.) or you can use a service like https://parse.com/ that offer targeting multiple devices at once.
Are you trying to install the same debug-based app on more than one device?
I believe that the channel is based on some identity of the app, so try to release it and I prefer you to create a store-based hidden app and test it..
The code you're writing is OK with millions of devices :)
According to this article,
Devices can specify one or more tags when registering with a Notification Hub, These tags don’t need to be pre-provisioned or disposed, and provide a very easy way for apps to send targeted notifications to millions of devices with a single API call, without you having to implement your own per-device notification routing infrastructure - https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2013/09/16/delivering-push-notifications-to-millions-of-devices-with-windows-azure-notification-hubs/#mQppyhpwaEAcMehc.97
In your Windows Store app, using the Windows Store device SDK, you can register to your Notification Hub simply calling
await hub.RegisterNativeAsync(channel.Uri, new string[] { "myTag", "myOtherTag" });
And then you can have your .NET backend broadcast a message to all your clients, just by calling
var toast = #"<toast><visual><binding template=""ToastText01""><text id=""1"">Hello everybody!</text></binding></visual></toast>";
await hub.SendWindowsNativeNotificationAsync(toast);
Related
I'm experimenting with push notifications. I want to make a simple electron app that will give to the user the ability to create an ngrok link to send to friends where thy can subscribe to the user who generated the link push notifications. I'm reading about GCM and it seems to be a good solution as a server to send notifications. My question is, if I store the device id of each user that will subscribe into a local database of the app, can I send notifications to the subscribed devices using GMC without authenticate the user into my app?
I have an UWP app which should notify all users of the same app if data gets inserted to the database.
On azure I have created a mobile app. And an "Easy Table" where I can insert data. Now I want to send a over my NotificationHub everytime something gets inserted.
I can connect to a notification hub but I cant send pushes over it
Is this impossible?
Yes, it is possible. You will just need to configure a custom script that will detect an update, and on update trigger a push that will be distributed to all registered clients (through the classic portal).
Some examples are outlined here (you need to register for the Update trigger).
To clarify, in the new model with the updated Azure Portal, you can use something along the lines described here. Essentially, you are capturing table.insert and triggering a push notification based on that.
At the moment I do the sending for the push from the UWP app itself.
For all hopeless Windows Developers I will post my solution as clear as possible:
First register to your Azure Notification Hub like you learned in other Tutorials. You have to make a test send over azure and receive the push notification.
After this works you have implement a code like this:
public static async void SendAlertPush(string message) {
var topicToRegister = new Topic("something-notificationhub", "Endpoint=sb://something-ns.servicebus.windows.net/;SharedAccessKeyName=RootManageSharedAccessKey;SharedAccessKey=blablabla=");
await topicToRegister.SendAsync("hallo");
}
As you see it is important to take the RootManageSharedAccessKey. You will find this in your Namespace where your notification hub is placed.
I recently migrated an old push notification app to a new Azure Mobile Service. The MPNS API, apparently, has changed. It also automatically created a notification hub. Now instead of being able to define a clear channel URI for the message to be sent to, I need to specify a tag. I find it very hard to find information on this and how to send messages to individual users from Azure Mobile Services.
How is this done now?
Its actually pretty simple. Use your unique user identifier as a tag when you register.
Here is an example.
Registration reg = new AppleRegistration(token)
reg.getTags().add(userId)
hub.createRegistration(reg)
Now when you want to send to that user, send via the tag.
hub.sendNotification(Notification.createAppleNotification(payload), userId)
With Notification Hubs you have a few different options. Tags are the way of identifying who you want to push to (i.e. when you push to tag X, any device that has registered with tag X will be pushed to). So if you want to push based off of channel URI, when you register from the device, you should use the Channel URI as one of the tags. If you want to be able to push to all of a single user's devices, you'd need a different mechanism of knowing who the user is (i.e. registering with the username as a tag and then pushing to the username).
I would like to use Azure Notification Hubs to send push notifications to users of my app running across iOS, Android and Windows Phone.
I have managed to get the basics working but I don't know how to manage the App uninstall story.
On starting, the mobile app will call my Identity Svc to get an Auth Token.
It then calls its Platform Notification service (eg Google Cloud Messaging, APNS) to get a PNS Token.
After persisting the token to local storage it will call a back-end Contact Svc to register the customer's device. This service will create a subscription to the Azure Notification hub for the device.
This is illustrated in the following diagram:
Later on a back-end publishing service will call the Contact Service requesting a push notification for a particular user id. The contact service will lookup the Id allocated to a tag on the notification hub and send a push request.
What options are available to determine when a customer uninstalls the app? Is it just a matter of trapping errors when calling "Send" on the notification hub? I guess this could work if only sending to a single user but my intention is that certain message types are to be published to multiple subscribers. On the initial registration of a device a subscription will be created for a tag of the user id but also for a more general tag such as "New Promotion". The publishing service would later want to issue a "New Promotion" notification to all devices.
Why do you need to know app uninstalls?
Notification Hubs automatically expire registrations for devices that get uninstalled.
Also, I would avoid persisting the PNSHandles in your service at all.
The current guidelines for using hubs are the following:
store the registrationIds of the registrations associated with the device in local storage. This enables you to update tags and channel information with a single update call.
Because mobile connections are not always reliable, it is best to avoid creating a new registration without being able to store the registrationId in local storage. This can result in the device registering multiple times, causing duplicate notifications. You can achieve this by using the Create Registration ID and Create or Update Registration REST APIs.
The first API returns a registrationId without actually creating a registration. When the ID has been securely stored on the device storage, the device can call the Create or Update Registration API.
So I would have your ContactSvc expose two functionalities:
a) create registration id (just call hub to get it)
b) create or update registration given (registrationId, pnsHandle, tags?)
Then your device keeps the regId in its storage, ad after getting the handle from PNS, if as regId is not there creates a new one with endpoint a), then updates the registration with pnsHandle and tags.
Note that in this way your service does not need to persist handles or UUIDs, and does not need to worry about app uninstalls.
If you are keeping track of users, one approach is to periodically (once a month?) check in your hub if its registrations are still there...
You can reach me at #eliodamaggio if this is not clear.
I am evaluating which Push Notification service to use out of Azure Mobile Services, Parse and Urban Airship.
One of the criteria is whether the service provides a way for the app to register a bespoke user Id or alias that can then easily be used when calling the service to send a push notification to an individual. This removes the need for our backend service to have a lookup table giving us the service registration ID for a given user.
Urban Airship has the alias feature: http://docs.urbanairship.com/connect/connect_audience.html#aliases
Parse has a sophisticated Installation object which behaves like a dictionary so that additional values can be added to it (like UserId). When the Parse service is called to send a Push Notification a query can be used to specify the user that will receive the message:
https://www.parse.com/docs/push_guide#sending-queries/REST
Is there an equivalent feature in Azure Mobile Services?
With Mobile Services, you would need to keep track of a user to token / channel URI / registration ID association in a table which is more work than you NEED to do. However, another feature of Windows Azure is Notification Hubs which does what you want (and much more). With Notification Hubs, from the client you say "I want to register for Notification Hubs, here are some tags you can use to push me information". Those tags can be anything you want including a User ID. Later on you can tell your Notification Hub to push to anyone registered with a certain tag. That would allow you to then push notifications out to any devices a specific user has registered.
The flow would look something like this:
Register with Push Provider (APNS, GCM, MPNS, WNS)
Send token to Notification Hubs along with tags (such as the User's ID)
Trigger a push to a specific Tag (i.e. User ID)
Notification Hubs will handle delivering a push to all devices with a Tag (again, their user ID)
Notification Hubs has client SDKs for WinPhone, WinStore, iOS, and Android so it's very easy to use from the client side. As far as triggering pushes goes, Notification Hubs exposes a REST API you can communicate with, there is a .NET SDK, a Node SDK, as well as an unofficial Java SDK. You can even use the Node SDK from Mobile Services which makes it super easy to combine authentication (i.e. getting User IDs) with data storage and push notifications. It also has lots of other features like templated push notifications so instead of specifying a different payload depending on what the device OS you're pushing to is, you can have the client application indicate how it should receive a certain type of push.