Problem Generating Remote Interactive Push Notifications Or a workaround ?

[amrlsayed]

Hi Guys,

I have a requirement in my project to have remote interactive notifications, Currently the project development is on Expo managed API’s for 6 months now (for the other requirements). Last week I have no luck implementing remote interactive notifications, however I can have it locally. For remote, I can send push notification and receive it on the device but not interactive. According to the documentation for notifications API’s there’s no words states that _category only works locally. so I assumed I can receive interactive push remotely too.

My Attempt was using curl as follow

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST "https://exp.host/--/api/v2/push/send" -d '{
  "to": "ExponentPushToken[XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX]",
  "title":"hello",
  "body": "world",
  "_category":"alarm",
  "data": {"title":"hello", "body":"hello"}
}'

and on the JS i have

    Notifications.createCategoryAsync(name="alarm", actions=[
      {
        "actionId":"Snooze",
        "buttonTitle":"Snooze 10 minutes"
      }
    ]);

The device receives the push however it’s not interactive.

I am testing on

• Android (v7 and v8)

• expo v32.0.2

• expo-cli v2.7.0

• react v16.5.0

• react-native sdk-31.0.0

Workaround

When the application is on the foreground or background (appears on the multitasking menu). On the notifications listener handler I dismiss the remote notification and generate another local notification
with a categoryId.

Notifications.dismissNotificationAsync(notification.notificationId); 
Notifications.presentLocalNotificationAsync({"title":notification.data.title,"body":notification.data.body,"categoryId":"alarm","data":{"title":notification.data.title,"body":notification.data.body}});

It works Good when the app is in the foreground or background but when the Application is completely closed ( not in the multitasking menu ). the App. Notification listener is no longer called when I receive the remote notification but only when I tab the notification. then the workaround doesn’t work and the notification is not longer interactive. When I tab the notification. the app launch and the listener handler is called. but this is too late as I want to have a single interactive notification.

The Question is

• Can I generate a remote interactive push notification using Expo?

• Is there a workaround to make it work as expected using local notifications?

• Should I eject ? search for another react native solution ? is there a module in react native supports interactive remote push notifications to use ?

The Expo project is awesome and saved me a lot of time, My problem is I spent long period building the project functions relying on Expo and React Native, and is too expensive to throw all the work and start over using another framework.

Thanks Guys,