How to trigger a "flyout, dialog, app bar or other inline element" if the phone receives a notification while the app is closed?

Question

I'm working on a Windows Phone app that will receive push notifications and needs to show critical alerts to the user. As far as I can see there are 3 types of push notification:

Raw Notification - Raw notifications are used when your application is actually running on the device. This allows you to update your interface “live” as the user is using it.

Toast Notification – This message will be received regardless of whether your application is running or not, but popping toast messages while your app is running might be a little annoying. I’ll demonstrate this example below. Toast WILL NOT also update your application’s data. You still need to pass a Raw Notification to make this happen.

Tile Notification – If your application is pinned to the user’s Start screen, you can update the Tile for your application. You can change the background image, as well as an integer from 0-99.

source: http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/2010/10/19/31-days-of-windows-phone-day-19-push-notifications/

These each have different behaviours, but none lend themselves to critical notifications, where the user can be actively alerted to critical information.

Having read Guidelines for toast notifications on MSDN, it suggests

Don't use toast notifications to notify the user of something that must be seen, such as a critical alert. To ensure that the user has seen your message, notify them in the context of your app with a Flyout, dialog, app bar, or other inline element.

So the question is, how can I trigger a "flyout, dialog, app bar or other inline element" if my app is closed and the phone receives a critical notification.

Answer 1

long story short: you can't enforce that your app opens on an incoming pns

But I think you've got the toast scenario wrong. A toast can be used to notify the user, if he taps it the app opens and you might react to that by the navigation uri (e.g.: ?fromToast=true).

If you receive a toast notification while your app is open the toast won't show. Toast Notifications only get displayed when your app isn't open. But you can react to an incoming toast notification (there's an event for that) to implement an behavior of your way (e.g.: flyout, msgbox, ...).

note: introduced with GDR3: The sound of the toast notification can now be changed (even made silent).