[Office Hours] Question about apple alert notification

[dusixian]

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Hi! I hope to set up an alert notification when a user hasn't input data for a week. I’ve reviewed the Apple tutorial. I believe that Spezi already registers for APNs and stores the device token. However, I’m unsure how to automatically trigger the notification and how to properly test it.

Would it be possible for me to schedule an office hour on Monday? The nearest available office hour is on Wednesday, but I’d like to clarify this earlier so I can submit my second pull request on time.

Thanks!

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[kkellybonilla]

I also need help with this. I looked into the SpeziNotifications module but I'm having a hard time understanding how to actually use it.

[PSchmiedmayer]

@dusixian @kkellybonilla Good question; there are two options here. I would point you to the second one but want to highlight them here.

Push Notifications

Use APNS push notifications from a server. It requires you to

1. Obtain the APNS token.
2. Upload it to a server, e.g., Firebase.
3. Write some logic on the server that triggers a notification.
4. Send that request to the Apple APNS server including the token to send the push notification to the client.

You can learn more about this, e.g., in this video: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10025. I think this is a good idea for a larger system. I would suggest going a simpler route if your main task is to just send a simple reminder notification after two weeks for the scope of the class and a first prototype.

Local Notifications

Trigger the notification as a local notification that can be cancelled if a user has successfully entered something in the app might be way easier and can be done completely locally. You have two larger options.

Spezi Scheduler

You can rely on the already integrated Spezi Scheduler module.
You can go ahead and schedule a task with an ID for a specific time in the future and set the scheduleNotifications argument to true and then use the Scheduler methods to query & delete that task or mark it as complete when a user has entered the information before that. E.g. a daily task could even send daily notifications to the user to enter their data. This might be a nice and native way to integrate this in your app.

Manually Trigger the Notification & Keep Track of it

You can follow articles such as Scheduling a notification locally from your app to schedule and keep track of your notifications right in your app.

[dusixian]

Thanks Paul! Will go through it.

[kkellybonilla]

hi @PSchmiedmayer. i had a follow up question on this:

is it possible to implement the spezi scheduler notifications such that if the user taps on the notification, then it takes them to a specific view in the app?

[PSchmiedmayer]

@kkellybonilla Yes, you can conform any Spezi Module to NotificationHandler, which allows a Spezi Module to react to interactions with the notification. handleNotificationAction(_:) is the method you want to implement to react to a notification & act accordingly. You can get all the relevant context from the passed in UNNotificationResponse