Low-level notification handling (deprecated)
You most probably want to implement an interceptor or a FirebaseMessagingService unless we told you otherwise. If the interceptor does not fit your needs, do not hesitate to contact us: we'll use this feedback to enhance the interceptor, and help you find a solution.\
In this article, we'll run through the process of intercepting push notifications and manually read the notification payload, before showing it using Batch or your own implementation.
Notice
This documentation describes what is called a "custom receiver": it is a low level implementation of receiving push notifications. It used to be the only way to tweak how Batch notifications are displayed, so older implementations of Batch SDK might still have one.
To make it so developers don't have to reimplement every feature Batch supports in notifications, we added another way: the notification interceptor, which does not require you to rewrite the NotificationBuilder implementation yourself, and is already started in a threaded service. You also get free support for new Android versions.
You should pick a notification interceptor if:
You want to change a single thing about a notification
Example: Priority, progess, ongoing, ...
You want to filter notifications at runtime
You should pick a custom receiver if:
You need to disable Batch's default handling to improve compatibility with other solutions
You need to react to the push's raw payload, and are not interested in changing how it will be displayed
In that case, consider using a FirebaseMessagingService
Note that both solutions are not mutually exclusive: a custom receiver can take care of a specific use case, and the notification interceptor will handle another.
Important Android O note
This documentation used to describe a way to implement your own logic when receiving a push message. If your application now targets Android O (API 26) or higher, old implementations might end up crashing due to changes in backgrounding rules.
Please note that, while not directly related to Services and new backgrounding limitations, notifications may suddently not work anymore if your code is not setting up and associating a Notification Channel to your Notification.
Since then, this documentation has been updated to use JobIntentService. You will need a recent version of the support-v4 library to continue.
Enabling Manual display
If you don't want Batch to display notifications, you should activate the manual display mode, you shall do it in your Application.onCreate
method:
Be sure to do it in the
onCreate
method of your Application not your Activity because your Activity may not be started when you receive a push notification from GCM.
Registering your own receiver
To receive GCM intents, you'll have to register your own push receiver and service in addition to Batch one.
First create an IntentService and a BroadcastReceiver to subcribe to GCM notifications
Here's the IntentService (note that PushReceiver
references your BroadcastReceiver
):
And here's the BroadcastReceiver (where PushService
is your JobIntentService
implementation):
Then register them into your application Manifest, near Batch ones:
Retreiving data from a Batch push
If you want to standard data contained in your Batch Push intent, Batch provides an easy way to retrieve them.
First of all, you can retrieve your push message and title (if you set one) this way:
If you use advanced features like deeplink, custom large icon or big picture, Batch provides with an object that make it easy to retrieve them. Here's how it works:
Reading the custom payload's key/values
You can also read the custom payload you've set while creating the campaign or sending a transactional push:
Note: If you want to read your custom payload, this should be done directly from the intent using
getStringExtra()
. While you might be tempted to read the extra with the keyBatch.Push.PAYLOAD_KEY
, this key is not applicable in this context, and will not return anything.
That's it, you are now ready to handle push messages that come from Batch Push servers. You can either:
Performing action before push display
If you want to simply do an action based on the received intent but don't want to display the notification yourself, you can do it quite simply:
If you want to have a chance to tweak some values of the notification Batch will show, you can also give Batch.Push.displayNotification
an interceptor. If an interceptor has been configured globally, Batch will try to use the one specified in this method call, if not null.
Displaying your own notification
If you want to display your own custom notification, you can do it yourself using the Notification.Builder
API. Batch provides with helpers that you'll need to use if you want to have the open rate available from our dashboard. Here's how to do it:
Note: If your app targets API 26 or higher (Android 8.0), please make sure that you register a notification channel, and specify it in the builder. Failure to do so will result in the system discarding your notifications.
Be sure to use the
PendingIntent.FLAG_UPDATE_CURRENT
flag when getting your pending intent. Failure to do so will make open tracking unreliable.
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