library-notifications

deltaDNA Android SDK Notifications

Contents

• Overview
• Adding to a project
• Integration
• Registering
• Advanced
• Styling and behaviour
• Unity
• Events
• ProGuard
• FAQs
• Changelog
• License

Overview

This is an add-on module for the deltaDNA Android SDK which allows for easy integration of push notifications into a project.

When sending a push notification to clients the implementation will show the message of the notification from the alert field in the Platform and the application's name as the title, unless a value under the title key has been added to the push notification's payload. When the notification is tapped by the user the module sends the appropriate events through the SDK.

More details on integration and customization can be found further on in this document.

Adding to a project

Gradle

In your top-level build script:

allprojects {
    repositories {
        maven {
            url 'https://maven.pkg.github.com/deltaDNA/android-sdk'
            credentials {
                username = "github_username"
                password = "github_personal_access_token"
            }
        }
    }
}

In your app's build script:

dependencies {
    implementation 'com.deltadna.android:deltadna-sdk:5.0.2'
    implementation 'com.deltadna.android:deltadna-sdk-notifications:5.0.2'
}

Integration

Once you have the SDK and the Notifications addon in your project you will need to add a NotificationListenerService definition inside of the application section

<service
    android:name="com.deltadna.android.sdk.notifications.NotificationListenerService">
    
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="com.google.firebase.MESSAGING_EVENT"/>
    </intent-filter>
</service>

While the above definition could have been provided by the library this service is quite important as it takes care of showing a notification on the UI when a push message is sent from the Platform, as such we are allowing for customization on how it behaves.

The last step is to add your Application and Sender IDs from the Firebase Console into the manifest file. If your application has been setup using the Google Developer Console then you can easily migrate the project to Firebase by following the instructions here.

<application ...>
    ...
    
    <meta-data
        android:name="ddna_application_id"
        android:resource="@string/application_id"/>
    <meta-data
        android:name="ddna_sender_id"
        android:resource="@string/sender_id"/>
</application>

You can always refer to the example implementation here.

Registering

In order to register the client for push notifications with the Platform the register() method needs to be called from DDNANotifications. This will initiate a request for retrieving a registration token from GCM, and send it to the deltaDNA servers.

A good time to call register() would be, for example, when the user enables notifications for the application in the settings or when a previous attempt to retrieve the token fails.

It is possible to unregister the client from push notifications by calling unregister() from DDNANotifications. If you wish to register later on then register() should be called.

Advanced

Styling and behaviour

If you would like to change the style of the notification, for example to use expandable text, the NotificationListenerService can be extended in order to modify the default behaviour.

An example can be found here. You will also need to change the service definition in the manifest file to point to the new class.

Unity

Changing the style on Unity is a bit more involved, but the steps below describe how to achieve this;

1. You will need to checkout the android-sdk project and open it in Android studio. Make sure that you've got all the necessary dependencies downloaded in order to be able to build the project.
2. Checkout the version of the project which you need in order to match the version used in the deltaDNA Unity SDK. You can find this out by navigating under Assets/DeltaDNA/Plugins/Android (or Assets/Plugins/Android for newer versions of our Unity SDK) and finding the version of the deltadna-sdk-notifications-*.aar file. For example, if the file in the directory was named deltadna-sdk-notifications-4.2.3.aar you would run git checkout 4.2.3 in the android-sdk project.
3. Now you can make changes to the NotificationListenerService class, either directly or by creating a new class extending from it and overriding the appropriate method.
4. After you have made the changes you can build the SDK by running ./gradlew clean build check from the root directory of the project. Once successfully built the new ARR can be copied from library-notifications/build/outputs/aar (make sure to use the release version) to Assets/DeltaDNA/Plugins/Android in order to replace the stock AAR. For newer versions of our Unity SDK you will need to copy the AAR file to Assets/Plugins/Android and delete Assets/DeltaDNA/Editor/Android/Dependencies.xml. If you have made the changes in a new class then you will also need to change the Listener Service entry in the notifications configuration UI for your Unity project to use your new class instead.

Events

The module sends a number of events related to registering for push notifications, posting them on the UI, and listening for user interactions on them. You can listen to these events by extending EventReceiver and overriding the required methods.

You will need to register your receiver in the manifest file of your application, for example:

<receiver
    android:name="your.package.name.YourClassName"
    android:exported="false">
    
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="com.deltadna.android.sdk.notifications.REGISTERED"/>
        <action android:name="com.deltadna.android.sdk.notifications.REGISTRATION_FAILED"/>
        <action android:name="com.deltadna.android.sdk.notifications.MESSAGE_RECEIVED"/>
        <action android:name="com.deltadna.android.sdk.notifications.NOTIFICATION_POSTED"/>
        <action android:name="com.deltadna.android.sdk.notifications.NOTIFICATION_OPENED"/>
        <action android:name="com.deltadna.android.sdk.notifications.NOTIFICATION_DISMISSED"/>
    </intent-filter>
</receiver>

An example implementation of an EventReceiver can be found here.

ProGuard

There is no need to add additional directives in your ProGuard configuration if you are setting minifyEnabled true for your application as the library provides its own configuration file which gets included by the Android build tools during the build process.