Push notifications

In Backbeam you don't send push notifications directly to certain devices. Instead, you subscribe devices to channels and then you send notifications to those channels. Backbeam takes care about what devices are in which channels.

To subscribe a device to a channel you need to know its device token and the gateway. At this moment two gateways are supported: apn (Apple Push Notifications for iOS devices) and gcm (Google Cloud Messaging for Android devices).

For iOS devices the device token is a string with the base64 representation of the NSData object you receive in the application:didRegisterForRemoteNotificationsWithDeviceToken: method in the AppDelegate. For Android devices the device token is the registration_id returned in the intent of type com.google.android.c2dm.intent.REGISTRATION.

Subscribing and unsubscribing devices

Once you know the device token you can subscribe that device to one or more channels easily.

var device = 'abcdefabcdefabcdefabcdefabcdef'
backbeam.subscribeDeviceToChannels('gcm', device, 'channel1', 'channel2', function(err) {
  // the device is now subscribed if no error ocurred
})

Unsubscribing a device from one or more channels is very similar:

var device = 'abcdefabcdefabcdefabcdefabcdef'
backbeam.unsubscribeDeviceFromChannels('gcm', device, 'channel1', 'channel2', function(err) {
  // the device is now unsubscribed from those channels if no error ocurred
})

You can also unsubscribe a device from all the channels

var device = 'abcdefabcdefabcdefabcdefabcdef'
backbeam.unsubscribeDeviceFromAllChannels('gcm', device, function(err) {
  // the device is now unsubscribed from all channels if no error ocurred
})

And finally you can query the channels that a device is subscribed to:

var device = 'abcdefabcdefabcdefabcdefabcdef'
backbeam.subscribedChannels('gcm', device, function(err, channels) {
  // if no error ocurred you will get all the channels in the `channels` array
})

Sending push notifications

At any moment you can send push notifications to a channel

var options = {
  apn_alert: 'Hello from node.js',
  apn_badge: 10,
  apn_payload_custom_key: 'custom value'
}
backbeam.sendPushNotification('channel1', options, function(err) {
  // notification sent to every device subscribed to that channel
})

The options object can have the following parameters:

• apn_alert The text to be shown in the iOS push notifications
• apn_badge An optional number that will be added to the app icon for iOS devices
• apn_sound An optional name of a sound file to be played when a notification arrives to a iOS device
• apn_payload_* You can include additional information adding keys with this prefix for iOS devices.
• gcm_collapse_key It is an arbitrary string that is used to collapse a group of like messages when the device is offline
• gcm_delay_while_idle A boolean used to request messages not be delivered until the device becomes active
• gcm_data_* You can include additional information adding keys with this prefix for Android devices.