Push notifications

The Action Node Push Notifications may be used to push notifications to iOS or Android phones having an Appfarm App installed. It allows you to target one or many Users having an App installed on his/her phone, and you may control the content and link of this notification.

Please read the remarks below before implementing Push notifications in your app.

Remarks regarding the use of Push notifications

Push notifications in web applications (and also in installed mobile apps to some extent) do not come with a delivery guarantee. It is not recommended to rely solely on push notifications for important alerts; they should be supplemented with email or SMS notifications if they are to be used.

To have the push notifications delivered to the user, the following must be in place before triggering push notifications to the user (using the Push notifications action node):

• The end-user App (used by the users who should receive the notifications) needs functionality for requesting permissions (e.g. a button for this purpose). A separate action node Request permissions exists for this purpose.

• When Request permissions is triggered, the browser/device prompts the user to accept the app's notification access. Users may decline this, effectively blocking push notifications (can be unblocked from the device app settings, or browser address bar). Some browsers may also automatically block this popup (e.g. Chrome may block by default if the user normally blocks such requests).

Settings

App

Select the App you want to push notifications to. A typical scenario is that you may want to implement some action in an Administration App targeting users of another mobile App with a notification.

Title

The title of the notification. Should be kept short and precise.

Message

The message to the user. A bit more elaborate than the title.

Open URL on Click

Define the URL to open when the user clicks the notification.

Time to Live

Define how long (in seconds) the notification will stay in the notifications center.

Recipient Data Source

Must be a Data Source containing (the built-in object class) Users.

Selection

Having a Recipient Data Source set, you must specify whether to send to All Users of that Data Source, the Selected Object(s), Object in Context, or a Filtered Selection. Note: if the link (defined in Open URL on Click) is personal, you will need to add the Push Notifications action node inside a Foreach action node, looping a Users Data Source (containing all users to be notified). Then, you may set the Recipient Data Source to the Users Data Source, and set the Selection to Object in Context of the Users Data Source.