How to use push notification template with several custom properties in Azure Notification Hub?

Question

We're following this tutorial: How To: Windows Azure Notification Hubs (Android Apps) for Android.

Everything works fine when structuring the notification payload as described in the guide. That is:

{
    "data": {
        "msg": "$(property1)"
    }
}

However, we'd like to extend the template to use more than one custom property in the payload. Something like:

{
  "data": {
    "msg": {
        "message": "$(property1)",
        "sender": "$(property2)"
    }
  }
}

where the back-end supplies the property values via:

Dictionary<string, string> templateValues = new Dictionary<string, string>
    {
        { "property1", "Hello world" },
        { "property2", "foo" }
    };

NotificationOutcome notificationOutcome = await Hub.SendTemplateNotificationAsync(templateValues, "test");

When registering the template in the notification hub from the mobile app we receive the following error:

"Supplied notification payload is invalid"

• Can several properties be used in the template?
• Should we send the property value (from the back-end) as a JSON (or other structure) string instead? What is the preferred approach? We will use the template on multiple platforms (iOS, Android)

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The payload is invalid because GCM does not support nested object in the data member. You can send the message with two property by registering for the following template:

{
   "data": {
      "message": "$(property1)",
      "sender": "$(property2)"
   }
}

In you Android receiver then you can retrieve your property with

intent.getStringExtra("property1");

Answer 2

In my tests, you can add your parameters:

Template:

{
   "data": {
      "message": "$(property1)",
      "args": "$(property2)",
      "myargs": "$(property3)",
   }
}

---

Data:

{  
    "property1":"Jonh",    
    "property2":"1,1",
    "property3":"0",
}

---

Results:

intent.Extras.GetString("message");
intent.Extras.GetString("args");
intent.Extras.GetString("myargs");