Tukukkk

I currently have a mobile app receiving push notifications through a notification hub in Azure and a web API back end. I want to perform application testing for iOS with a secondary notification hub set to Development so that registered users do not receive notifications from my testing.

On the Azure portal I see that the back end is associated with the notification hub currently set to production for Apple APNS, as seen in photo below.

Within the mobile app, in the Xamarin iOS project, the registration with the back-end is performed as follows:

async Task SendRegistrationToServerAsync(NSData deviceToken)

        {

            //this is the template/payload used by iOS. It contains the "messageParam"

            // that will be replaced by our service



            const string templateBodyAPNS = @"{

                                                ""aps"" : {

                                                    ""alert"" : ""$(messageParam)"",

                                                    ""mutable-content"": 1

                                                },

                                            }";





            var templates = new JObject();

            templates["genericMessage"] = new JObject

            {

                {"body", templateBodyAPNS }

            };



            // send registration to web api

            // MobileServiceUrl points to the Web API mentioned above

            var client = new MobileServiceClient(MyMobileAppName.App.MobileServiceUrl); 

            await client.GetPush().RegisterAsync(deviceToken, templates);



            //get the installation id

            Console.WriteLine("Installation id1: " + client.InstallationId.ToString());

        }

The questions are:

1. In Application Settings can I added another HubName and HubId (to separate development and production) and also add the associated second connection string for it in Connection strings.Will registering with the web API in the code line above automatically detect which hub is in development and which is in production depending on the environment the application is run in?

OR Will there be an error for having two hubs associated with the same web api and the application will not function properly?

Will registering with the web API in the code line above automatically detect which hub is in development and which is in production depending on the environment the application is run in?

If you want to stick the application setting or connection string to the development and production environment, I recommend that you could use the Application setting slot setting to implement it(Check the slot setting checkbox).

This is achieved by making the setting 'sticky to the slot'. We could get more information from this blog.

What I ended up doing to solve this problem is create a secondary "development" web API service with almost identical code.

I realized that each web API can be connected to a single Notification Hub when selecting the "Push" tab in Azure under the Web API service "Overview" tab.

The development web API I connected to a newly created Notification Hub (within same namespace as the mobile app project) set to "Sandbox" for APNS.

I changed the "entitlements.plist" "apns-environemt" key of the iOS project in Xamarin to "development" and uploaded the development p12 to the new notification hub.

Also i changed the line of code in the iOS project that registers with the web API to point to the new web API created (and hence register with the new hub for notifications).

// send registration to the NEW development web api               

            var client = new MobileServiceClient(MyMobileAppName.App.NewWebAPIMobileServiceUrl); 

            await client.GetPush().RegisterAsync(deviceToken, templates);



            //get the installation id

            Console.WriteLine("Installation id1: " + client.InstallationId.ToString());

When ready to submit an update to app store I just change the above line of code to point to the original, production web api and hub and also of course edit the entitlement plist(s) of the iOS project and potentially notification service extension to have their "aps-environment" changed to "production".

This way can even send notifications to the particular installation id of the development device but can even send to any device registered in development mode through the new web api and hub.