Send push notifications to devices at specific time set by the user using Azure functions and Notification hubs

Question

I am trying to send notifications to user's mobile devices registered on azure notification hub at specific time set by the user to receive notification. To do this, I am using azure TimerTrigger functions to trigger the function every 1 minute to read notification details from DB and send that information to azure notification hub, so that it can send notifications.

My question is can I send notifications to registered devices using azure notification hub at a specific time set by the users?

The above approach is correct? or is there any better way to do the same using resources on Azure

Answer 1

Where you're currently populating your database, you could also setup a NotificationHub ScheduledSend. This will reduce how frequently you have to read your database. However, a scheduled send is not a recurrent operation. So if your user wants to be notified once a day, you'll still need to enqueue a new scheduled message once a day.

At time of writing, scheduled sends are only available on the paid "Standard" SKU. Notification Hubs is pretty cheap though, so it may pay off to use Azure functions less often.