Android Inbox

Inbox Feature: Notification Handling

The Inbox feature within our platform manages push notifications in a manner designed to provide users with the most relevant and up-to-date information. One aspect of this functionality involves the handling of notifications sent within a specific time frame. Therefore, notifications sent five minutes ago and earlier will be deleted when a new notification is received. This ensures that only the latest and most pertinent information is retained in the user's inbox.

If your application needs information about the push notifications that are previously sent to device by Netmera, you can use NetmeraInbox class to fetch that information from Netmera.

The most common use case for this would be to show the list of notifications inside your application in an inbox-style interface.

NetmeraInbox is the core class providing methods and properties needed for operations on push notifications like fetching push objects or updating push objects' status, but you can not directly initialize a NetmeraInbox instance. You get an instance from SDK, then operate on that instance for future inbox actions. Here is the common workflow to use inbox feature of Netmera.

Determine properties of push notifications to fetch

You must first define filtering properties by creating a NetmeraInboxFilter instance. You can determine which push notifications will be included in the fetched list by setting related properties of this NetmeraInboxFilter instance.

NetmeraInboxFilter class provides filtering according to the following options:

• Inbox Status: Read / Unread / Deleted

• Categories: Categories to which push notifications are belong.

• Including expired push notifications or not.

• Page Size: This is not to filter, but to determine the size of chunks which will be gathered during one request.

Here is a sample code to determine filtering options:

NetmeraInboxFilter filter = new NetmeraInboxFilter.Builder()
        //Default value is Integer.MAX_VALUE
        .pageSize(20)
        // Default value is NetmeraPushObject.STATUS_READ | NetmeraPushObject.STATUS_UNREAD
        .status(NetmeraPushObject.STATUS_ALL)
        //Default value is null
        .categories(Arrays.asList("category_1", "category_2"))
        //Default value is false
        .includeExpiredObjects(true)
        //create filter object from builder
        .build();

Fetch the first page and get the NetmeraInbox instance

Now, you can request from Netmera to return the list of push notification objects matching with the filter object using the following code:

Netmera.fetchInbox(filter, new NetmeraInbox.NetmeraInboxFetchCallback() {
        @Override public void NetmeraInbox.NetmeraInboxFetchCallback(NetmeraInbox netmeraInbox, NetmeraError error) {
          if (error != null) {
            // handle error
            Toast.makeText(context, error.getMessage(), Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();
            return;
          }
          // Store returned inbox object for future operations
          mInbox = netmeraInbox;
        }
      });

If fetch operations succeeds, NetmeraInbox.NetmeraInboxFetchCallback's NetmeraInbox.NetmeraInboxFetchCallback method will be called with an inbox object which contains the first chunk of push notifications matching with given filter, and a null error. Otherwise, it will be called with a null inbox object and an error object containing details about the reason of failure.

Now you can present the list of push objects inside your application. You get the list using pushObjects() method of NetmeraInbox, which return a list of NetmeraPushObject instances. Moreover, for further operations like fetching next pages, setting status, you will be using NetmeraInbox object's methods.

⚠️ Filter properties of an inbox instance could not be changed. If you need to modify filter properties, you have to create a new filter object and start a new fetch operation using Netmera.fetchInbox method.

Fetch next pages via NetmeraInbox object

After you get NetmeraInbox object which contains first page of the push notifications, you can fetch next pages with a very similar code shown above but this time via your NetmeraInbox instance.

New pages are collected on already created NetmeraInbox object, therefore you can use same response handling with fetching first page.

NetmeraInbox has a method named hasNextPage for checking whether there exists more pages or not. You can use that method to decide whether you should fetch next page or not, to change your ui to let user know she has got to the end of list, etc.

Here is the sample code:

if(mInbox.hasNextPage()){
  mInbox.fetchNextPage(new NetmeraInbox.NetmeraInboxFetchCallback() {
        @Override public void onFetchInbox(NetmeraInbox netmeraInbox, NetmeraError error) {
          //handle same as former sample
        }
      });
}

⚠️ If you call fetchNextPage when there is no more next page, onFetchInbox method will be called immediately with a no next page error.

Update the status of push notifications

Push notifications may have 3 different states, which are the followings:

• Unread

• Read

• Deleted

These three states allows you to implement a simple notification inbox interface for your users where they can read messages, mark previously read message as unread, delete messages and restore them again if needed.

You can make transitions among states for push notifications inside inbox using updateStatus method. Calling this method will start an asynchronous request to update status for given push objects, and given callback will be called upon the result of the request.

Here is a sample implementation which deleted the first 5 push objects from inbox:

List<NetmeraPushObject> objectsToDelete = inbox.pushObjects().subList(0, 5);
inbox.updateStatus(objectsToDelete, NetmeraPushObject.STATUS_DELETED,
    new NetmeraInbox.NetmeraInboxStatusCallback() {
  @Override public void onSetStatusInbox(NetmeraError error) {
    if (error != null) {
      //handle
    }
  }
});

If operation fails for some reason, completion block will be called with a nonnull error parameter describing the reason of failure.

You can change the status of all the notifications in Inbox with a single method. You can call this method without calling the fetch / inbox method.

public static void updateAll(@NetmeraPushObject.InboxStatus final int inboxStatus,
                             final NetmeraInbox.NetmeraInboxStatusCallback callback)

Get count for one or more status

You can get total count of push objects according to the status info among the push objects that matches given filter. Count can be get only for one specific status as well as for combined set of status values.

//get count of deleted push objects
inbox.countForStatus(NetmeraPushObject.STATUS_DELETED);

//get count of read push objects
inbox.countForStatus(NetmeraPushObject.STATUS_READ);

//get count of unread push objects
inbox.countForStatus(NetmeraPushObject.STATUS_UNREAD);

Message Category

In Netmera, we have a feature called Message Category. You may specify your categories in the Setting > Message Category page in the panel.

User Category Preferences:

To retrieve the user's category preferences, use the following method. It will return a list of category preferences, where each category preference data includes id, name, and enable status.

To manage the preference of a category and switch its status, use the following method. Provide the category ID and set the categoryEnabled parameter to either true or false.

Netmera.getUserCategoryPreferenceList(object: NMCategoryPreferenceFetchCallback {
    override fun onSuccess(categoryPreferenceList: MutableList<NMCategoryPreference>) {
        val strBuilder = StringBuilder()
        strBuilder.append("- CATEGORY OPT-IN LIST - \n")
        for (nmCategoryOptIn in categoryPreferenceList) {
            strBuilder.append(nmCategoryOptIn.optInStatus)
                .append(" - ")
                .append(nmCategoryOptIn.categoryId)
                .append(" - ")
                .append(nmCategoryOptIn.categoryName)
                .append("\n")
        }

        binding.categoryList.text = strBuilder.toString()
    }

    override fun onFailure(error: String?) {
        Toast.makeText(
            this@CategoryOptinActivity,
            "Error occurred :: $error",
            Toast.LENGTH_LONG
        ).show()
    }

})

These methods allow you to effectively fetch and manage category preferences for users in Netmera.