Pntfr

Push Notifier is a simple adapter for APNS (Apple Push Notification Service) and GCM (Google Cloud Messaging) gems, that way you can use one message format and one library to send push notifications to both devices.

Usage

Installation

Add it to your Gemfile:

gem 'pntfr', '0.6.1'

Configuration

Pntfr can be configured in two ways.

• Setting a global configuration
• Setting notification service's configuration on each call.

Global configuration

To configure the Apple Push Notification Service just set the Hash of keys to be used:

Pntfr.configure do |config|
  config.apns= {
    host: 'gateway.sandbox.push.apple.com',
    pem: 'config/apns/development_push.keys.pem',
    port: 2195,
    pass: 'ThaPasswah',
  }
end

To configure the Google Cloud Messaging

Pntfr.configure do |config|
  config.gcm= {:notification_key => 'SomeSecretKeySomeSecretKeySomeSecretKey'}
end

You will normally configure both at the same time:

Pntfr.configure do |config|
  config.apns= {
    host: 'gateway.sandbox.push.apple.com',
    pem: 'config/apns/development_push.keys.pem',
    port: 2195,
    pass: 'ThaPasswah',
  }
  config.gcm= {:notification_key => 'SomeSecretKeySomeSecretKeySomeSecretKey'}
end

Sending messages

Pntfr suposes you have Device objects, or other kind of model, with platform and push_id attributes. Also, and optionally, a num_notifs integer attribute will be automagically managed to monitor Apple's badge in notifications (for device objects with an increment! method (like ActiveRecord;) will use increment!(:num_notifs), for non ActiveRecord like device objects num_notifs+= 1 will be used).

In order to avoid having to create a different message for each platform Pntfr expects a "neutral format" for the messages. The neutral format of the messages is a map composed by title and description keys. This keys are added directly to Android notification's data content, on the other side, for Apns notifications, are concatenated with a newline

Sending a notification is quite simple.

1. Create a notifier to manage each recipient's connection. This notifier manages platform specific sessions and will take care of the message structure for each platform and of connecting through the correct driver.
2. Set the message to be sent
3. Notify.

You're done.

Given you have a Device model in your application. Then to send notifications to a device do:

# SEND ONE NOTIFICATION TO A SINGLE DEVICE
# get the device to be notified
device= Device.new(platform: Pntfr::Platforms::IOS, push_id: '...')
# send notification to the given device
Pntfr::Notifier.to(device).msg({:title => 'Some Title', :description => 'A description'}).notify

# SEND ONE NOTIFICATION TO MANY DEVICES
# using ActiveRecord for example
notifier= Pntfr::Notifier.new
notifier.notify({
  :title => 'Some Other Title',
  :description => 'Another description',
  :sound => 'flipping-sound.aiff'})
Device.find_in_batches do |devices|
  notifier.update_devices(devices)
  notifier.notify
end

# SEND MANY NOTIFICATIONS TO A GIVEN DEVICE
notifier= Pntfr::Notifier.to(device)
notifier.msg({:title => 'Title1', :description => 'Description 1'}).notify
notifier.msg({:title => 'Title2', :description => 'Description 2'}).notify
notifier.msg({:title => 'Title3', :description => 'Description 3'}).notify
...

# NOTIFICATIONS WITH CUSTOM CONTENT
# send notifications with custom content (extra and optional parameter to #msg)
notifier= Pntfr::Notifier.to(device)
notifier.msg(
  {:title => 'Short Title'},
  {
    :extra1 => 'extra one',
    :extra_2 => 'extra 2',
    :'last-extra' => {lastkey: 'last value'}
  }
)
notifier.notify
# for IOS will result in the adding the custom content in the msg this way:
msg[:other][:custom]= {
    :extra1 => 'extra one',
    :extra_2 => 'extra 2',
    :'last-extra' => {lastkey: 'last value'}
  }
# for ANDROID will result in the adding the custom content in the msg this way:
msg[:custom]= {
    :extra1 => 'extra one',
    :extra_2 => 'extra 2',
    :'last-extra' => {lastkey: 'last value'}
  }

# SETTING ANPS AND GCM CREDENTIALS ON EACH NOTIFICATION
# using different configuration on each call
credentials= {
  # for ios you select what you override, in this case host and port will be
  # kept from the general configuration
  ios: {
        pem: 'test-pem',
        pass: 'test-password',
      },
  andr: 'notification key'
}
notifier= Pntfr::Notifier.new( credentials )
# this Notifier instance overrides the global credentials configuration (if any)
notifier.update_devices(device).msg({:title => 'Title', :description => 'Description'}).notify
# of course the device's push_id and credentials should belong to the same application.

Apns Feedback

This is specific of the Apple Push Notification Service. To clean the database from bad devices that will slow down batch notification sendings, one must check which devices caused error on the past and remove them from the database.

The process is easy, simply ask the Apns service for the list of bad devices, and then do the cleaning.

feedback= Pntfr::Feedback.new
bad_devices= feedback.bad_devices

# do the cleaning of your database, for example
bad_devices.each do |bad_device|
  d= Device.find_by_platform_and_push_id(Pntfr::Platforms.IOS, bad_device.push_id)
  d.destroy
end

bad_devices is an Array of Pntfr::BadDevice objects with the two attributes returned by the apns feedback service: timestamp and push_id.

It is recommended to do a feedback cleaning once a day.

Testing

For testing, one can check the messages sent to each device the same way that Rails ActiveMailer works: messages are stacked into Pntfr.deliveries[push_id], where for each key (push_id is the identifier of the device) one will get an ordered array with all messages sent to the device while testing. Of course, while testing, notifications are not sent, only stored in the stack.

Further development (roadmap)

• Update cannonical push id when required for gcm.

Resources

• Depends on APNS gem: https://rubygems.org/gems/apns
• Depends on GCM gem: https://rubygems.org/gems/gcm
• Alternative, that supports more platforms but without a unified api: https://github.com/rpush/rpush

Authors

• Oliver Valls https://github.com/tramuntanal

Contributions are always welcomed and greatly appreciated!