Deferentiating the push notification handler when application is foreground and background

3
votes

It is said that (correct me if I'm wrong) if the application is in the foreground we have to handle push notifications in the "didReceiveRemoteNotification" and if the application is in the background using "didFinishLaunchingWithOptions" when user taps the "view" button of the app. As I dont have a phone to test I want to know whether I am handling this properly.

1) What will be invoked when I taps on the "View" button in the push notification?

2) Let say I am running the application in the foreground and push notification receives at the same time. Will I be given the push notification alert? If so what will happen if the user click on the View button?

3) In this thread How to handle push notifications if the application is already running? it says:

"alert" key will not be there directly under the userInfo dictionary, you need to get another dictionary with name "aps" and then get the "alert" or "body" from "aps" dictionary"

Is this true?

4) I need to push to a certain view when the user clicks on the View button. Hence do I need to handle that code in both methods?

Thank you

1
iphoneiphone-sdk-3.0ios4push-notificationapple-push-notifications

1 Answers

2
votes

There's a nice rundown of the methods invoked by a push notification in this Apple vid: http://developer.apple.com/videos/iphone/#video-advanced-pushnotification - make sure you visit download the full version in iTunes.

This direct link might work: http://developer.apple.com/itunes/?destination=adc.apple.com.3391495696.03391495702.3416205190?i=1378617410

  1. Either way, the general idea is that if your app isn't in the foreground, tapping your view button will trigger didFinishLaunchingWithOptions, and if it is the foreground app, you'll get the didReceiveRemoteNotification.

  2. I don't think you'll get the alert. The method didReceiveRemoteNotification will be called, and it'll be up to you to show a UIAlert if you want.

  3. Yes - that's true.

  4. Yes, but I think you can simplify this by creating a third method specifically designed to handle your view. You can call this from both didFinishLaunching (only if it launched via a notification), and didReceiveRemoteNotification. This way, if your app needs to be launched, you can have time to do any other setup you might need to do for the app to work right out of the get-go (load saved data, init tabbar controllers or anything else like that).

Best of luck