Push notifications are a powerful marketing tool that if used effectively can increase both user engagement and customer life time value by driving more sales within your application. Kite supports sending push notifications to your customers with a bit of configuration.
In order to set up push messaging, you will need to perform the following steps:
- Set up Google Cloud Messaging (GCM)
- Add Kite SDK and GCM modules to your app
- Create a push notification action
Kite push notifications on Android make use of the Google Cloud Messaging framework. It is necessary, therefore, to set up Google Cloud Messaging before adding push notifications to your app.
Log in to Google's API Console. If you do not already have a Google account, create one now.
If you have not already created a project, click on Create Project to create a new one.
When you have created a project, the console's dashboard will be displayed. Make a note of the project number near the top of the page - this 12-digit number will be your Google Sender Id, which you will need to include in your app as a string resource later.
From the Google Developer's Console dashboard, choose Enable and manage APIs from the API section.
In the list of APIs, look for Google Cloud Messaging, and enable it by clicking the switch at the top of the page. Click Credentials section in the sidebar. Select API key from the Create credentials dropdown button and choose to create a Server key.
Once you have obtained an API key, you should log in to the Notification section of the Kite Dashboard and enter the key into the Android GCM API Key field.
We publish builds of our SDK and the optional GCM support module to the Maven central repository as .aar files. These files contains all of the classes, resources, and configurations that you'll need to use the library with push notifications. To install the library inside Android Studio, you can simply declare it as dependecy in your build.gradle file:
dependencies {
compile 'ly.kite:kite-print-sdk:4+'
compile 'ly.kite:kite-print-sdk-gcm:4+'
}Ensure that your app AndroidManifest.xml contains the following permissions:
<permission android:name="<your-app-package>.permission.C2D_MESSAGE" android:protectionLevel="signature" />
<uses-permission android:name="<your-app-package>.permission.C2D_MESSAGE"/>
Be sure to replace <your-app-package> with your application package. Also ensure that the AndroidManifest.xml contains the following declarations. Notice that the service declaration is for a listener service. The name should be adjusted to match the package and class name that you use. A template class GCMListenerService is provided for reference at the end of this document and in the SampleApp module included with the Kite SDK.
<application
...>
...
<receiver
android:name="com.google.android.gms.gcm.GcmReceiver"
android:exported="true"
android:permission="com.google.android.c2dm.permission.SEND" >
<intent-filter>
<action android:name="com.google.android.c2dm.intent.RECEIVE" />
<category android:name="<your-app-package>" />
</intent-filter>
</receiver>
<service
android:name=".GCMListenerService"
android:exported="false" >
<intent-filter>
<action android:name="com.google.android.c2dm.intent.RECEIVE" />
</intent-filter>
</service>
...
</application>Again be sure to replace <your-app-package> with your application package in the above.
Add your Google Sender Id as a string resource. Remember from earlier that this is the 12-digit project number from the Google API Console.
<resources>
...
<string name="gcm_sender_id">your-12-digit-project-number</string>
...
</resources>The GCMRegistrationService class in the Kite-GCM module takes care of obtaining a Google Cloud Messaging token, and registering it with the Kite servers.
Where appropriate in your app (we recommend doing it right at application startup in your main activity), start the registration service as follows:
GCMRegistrationService.start( this );You do not need to keep track of whether you have already called this, or whether registration succeeded, as the service automatically takes care of this for you.
Once a push notification has arrived, you must decide what to do with it. Often an app will create an Android notification to display the message to the user. Alternatively, you may choose to parse the message and perform an app action. However you decide to handle the notification, you must implement a listener service. As mentioned previously, a template is provided in the SampleApp module, but your implementation may look something like this:
...
import android.app.Notification;
import android.app.NotificationManager;
import android.app.PendingIntent;
import android.content.Context;
import android.content.Intent;
import android.content.SharedPreferences;
import android.os.Bundle;
import android.preference.PreferenceManager;
import android.util.Log;
import com.google.android.gms.gcm.GcmListenerService;
public class GCMListenerService extends GcmListenerService
{
////////// Static Constant(s) //////////
@SuppressWarnings( "unused" )
private static final String LOG_TAG = "GCMListenerService";
private static final int REQUEST_CODE = 10;
private static final int NOTIFICATION_ID = 11;
...
@Override
public void onMessageReceived( String from, Bundle data )
{
String message = data.getString( "message" );
Log.d( LOG_TAG, "From: " + from );
Log.d( LOG_TAG, "Message: " + message );
// We don't do anything with topics at the moment, so every message is assumed
// to be a normal downstream message.
// Check if the user is OK to receive notification messages
...
// Create a notification
// We want to go into the home activity when the notification is clicked
Intent intent = new Intent( this, MainActivity.class );
PendingIntent pendingIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity( this, REQUEST_CODE, intent, PendingIntent.FLAG_CANCEL_CURRENT );
Notification.Builder notificationBuilder = new Notification.Builder( this );
notificationBuilder
.setSmallIcon( R.drawable.ic_notification )
.setContentTitle( getString( R.string.app_name ) )
.setContentText( message )
.setContentIntent( pendingIntent )
.setAutoCancel( true );
NotificationManager notificationManager = (NotificationManager)getSystemService( Context.NOTIFICATION_SERVICE );
notificationManager.notify( NOTIFICATION_ID, notificationBuilder.getNotification() );
}
...
}