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OneSignal

About

OneSignal is a high volume and reliable push notification service for websites and mobile applications. They support all major native and mobile platforms by providing dedicated SDKs for each platform, a RESTful server API, and an online dashboard for marketers to design and send push notifications.

OneSignal provides a simple interface to push notifications, letting content creators focus on quality user engagement instead of complex implementation.

This section describes how to setup your AIR application to use OneSignal with this extension.

This service is supported by the following variants of this extension:

  • OneSignal

Setup​

You should firstly setup OneSignal for your application. See the setup documentation to guide you through this process.

At the end of this process you should have your OneSignal App ID which will be required later.

Install​

The simplest way to install and manage your AIR native extensions and libraries is to use the AIR Package Manager (apm). We highly recommend using apm, as it will handle downloading all required dependencies and manage your application descriptor (Android manifest additions, iOS info additions etc).

However you can choose to install it manually, as you would have done in the past.

info

Note: All of the commands below should be run in a terminal / command prompt in the root directory of your application, generally the level above your source directory.

If you don't have an APM project setup, expand the guide below to setup an APM project before installing the extension.

Setup APM

Install APM​

If you haven't installed apm follow the install guide on airsdk.dev.

Setup an APM project​

You will need an APM project for your application.

There are many ways to do this and for more options see the APM documentation. Here we will just initialise a new empty project:

apm init

Check your github token​

We use github to secure our extensions so you must have created a github personal access token and configured apm to use it.

To do this create a token using this guide from github and then set it in your apm config using:

apm config set github_token ghp_XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

If you don't do this correctly you may find the install will fail.

Install the extension​

Install the extension by running: 

apm install com.distriqt.PushNotifications-OneSignal

This will download and install the extension, required assets, and all dependencies.

Once complete apm will have created something like the following file structure: 

.
|____ assets
| |____ ios 
| | |____ Frameworks
| | | |____ [dynamic frameworks]
|____ ane
| |____ com.distriqt.PushNotifications.OneSignal.ane    # PushNotifications extension
| |____ [dependencies]
|____ apm_packages                                      # cache directory - ignore
|____ project.apm                                       # apm project file

  • Add the ane directory to your IDE. See the tutorials located here on adding an extension to your IDE.

  • You will have an assets directory that contains required assets for the installed extensions. You must add the assets/ios folder to the root of your iOS application package. (The ios folder contains a Frameworks folder with the required iOS dynamic frameworks).

info

We suggest you use the locations directly in your builds (rather than copying the files elsewhere) so that updates with apm will be pulled automatically into your build.

  • You must set a few pieces of configuration information for OneSignal. This will allow apm to automatically insert them into the correct position in your application descriptor. This includes:

    • bundleSeedId: Bundle Seed Id (or App ID Prefix) for your iOS application
    • apsEnvironment: production for release builds and development for development builds
    • getTaskAllow: false for release builds and true for development builds

You can call the following to step through the all the configuration values for this extension:

apm project config set com.distriqt.PushNotifications
Build Types

We suggest creating a build type to allow you to easily switch between the production and development configurations. To do this run the following additional commands (assuming you setup the main configuration for production): 

apm -b development project config set apsEnvironment development
apm -b development project config set getTaskAllow true

This will set the values of those properties to be different for the "development" build type.

Application Descriptor​

Updating your application descriptor will insert the required extensionID's and generate the manifest and info additions for your application.

You update your application descriptor by running:

apm generate app-descriptor src/MyApp-app.xml

Change the path (src/MyApp-app.xml) to point to your application descriptor.

Build Types

If you setup a development build type you can update your app descriptor with this configuration by using :

apm -b development generate app-descriptor src/MyApp-app.xml

Or you could maintain a separate "development" app descriptor by changing the output eg:

apm -b development generate app-descriptor src/MyApp-dev-app.xml
caution

This will modify your application descriptor replacing the manifest additions and info additions with the ones generated from apm.

You should backup your application descriptor before running this command to ensure you don't lose any information.

If you need to insert custom data into these sections see the guides for Android and iOS