Customizing notifications

Custom small notification icon

Small icons appear in the Android notification bar and allow users to recognize your app when they receive a notification. Before releasing a new version of your app on the Store, you should make sure you've set a custom small icon for your notifications.

Small icon samples

The small icon should be opaque white, using only the alpha channel and 24x24dp. You can easily create one using the Android Assets Studio.

If you use a colored small icon, Android will display it as a white square:

Small icon with issue

In order to set it up with Batch Push, you have to do three things:

1

Step 1.

Put your small icon drawables in the Android project's res folder, for all screen densities. Your projet folder architecture should look like that:

res
 ├── drawable-hdpi
 │   └── ic_notification_icon.png
 ├── drawable-mdpi
 │   └── ic_notification_icon.png
 ├── drawable-xhdpi
 │   └── ic_notification_icon.png
 └── drawable-xxhdpi
     └── ic_notification_icon.png

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Step 2.

Once you did that, add the following in your manifests' <application> tag:

<meta-data
            android:name="com.batch.android.push.smallicon"
            android:resource="@drawable/ic_notification_icon" />

Your notifications will now automatically use that icon. Please note that you are not forced to use ic_notification_icon for the icon's name. The name in the manifest simply needs to match the filenames.

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Step 3.

For your Android 5.0 users (and newer), you should set a color to your notification, which will be shown behind the small icon.

Accent color

Simply add this in your manifest, just like the small icon metadata:

<meta-data
    android:name="com.batch.android.push.color"
    android:value="#FF00FF00" />

You can also use android:resource instead of android:value and point to a color defined in an XML ressource file.

Disabling foreground notifications

By default, the Batch Cordova plugin will always show foreground notifications on both platforms and will trigger a batchPushReceived event when tapped.

The SDK exposes a method on the push module to change this behaviour on iOS:

// This should be right after batch.start()
batch.push.setiOSShowForegroundNotifications(false);

On Android, simply add the following to your manifest:

<meta-data android:name="com.batch.android.push.foreground_push_handling" android:value="true" />

Disabling foreground notifications will automatically trigger mobile landings when attached to a push received while the App is in foreground.

Managing Android notification display

You can restrict notification display on Android by calling :

batch.push.setAndroidShowNotifications(false);

Re-enabling notifications:

batch.push.setAndroidShowNotifications(true)

Batch will remember this value, even if your Application reboots. You can ask to Batch whether notifications are disabled or not with : batch.push.shouldShowAndroidNotifications() .

Managing iOS notification display

Just like Android, you can set the notification types you want on iOS.

The enum is batch.push.iOSNotificationTypes, and contains BADGE, SOUND, ALERT.

For example, if you want to disable sound:

batch.push.setiOSNotificationTypes(batch.push.iOSNotificationTypes.ALERT |
                                    batch.push.iOSNotificationTypes.BADGE);

Since this setting affects what the user will be asked to allow in the iOS notification request popup, this should be done before you call batch.push.registerForRemoteNotifications().