Is there a way to integrate the Firebase real time database with the newly introduced Firebase Cloud Messaging services ?
I am building an app which uses the the Firebase realtime database for storing data. I want to notify my users using push notifications for every new insert in the database. I came across tutorials which teach you how to use FCM, but most of them require you to set up your own server for storing tokens.
Is there a serverless way of integrating Firebase DB with FCM ?
Sending messages to devices based on inserts into the Firebase Database will require you to run a trusted process, typically on an app server that you control. This trusted process listens to the database changes and then calls Firebase Cloud Messaging to send the messages.
For an example of how to send messaging from a node.js script, see my answer here: How to send Firebase Cloud Messaging from a node server?
Related
I have a Flutter app integrated with a Firebase Realtime Database.
I want a notification (actually an alarm kind of thing if possible), when an item (lets call it alarm) in the database is set to "true". I always see firebase_messaging plugin for notifications, but I am not sure if I'm supposed to use this plugin despite that my app doesn't have anything to do with messaging.
I am totally new to both Flutter and Firebase, can you tell me how to listen to the database even if the app is not running?
By the way, I am currently building the app for only Android, but I want to build it for IOS too in the future.
Thanks.
You can use/write firebase cloud fucntion. Using firebase cloud function you can watch any document/field and try to write trigger logic like if a field is set to true then this cloud function will throw an notification via firebase messaging.
https://firebase.flutter.dev/docs/functions/overview/
When the user is not actively using the app there is no reliable way to continue to listen to changes in the Firebase Realtime Database. To notify the user of changes to the database in that situation, you'll need to listen for those change on an environment that is always on, and then send a message to the user through Firebase Cloud Messaging.
One environment that is always in is Cloud Functions, which is also part of Firebase, and allows you to run small snippets of JavaScript code on Google's servers in response to things that happen in your Firebase project. The documentation of Cloud Functions for Firebase as example of how to notify the user when something interesting happens in the database:
Developers can use Cloud Functions to keep users engaged and up to date with relevant information about an app. Consider, for example, an app that allows users to follow one another's activities in the app. Each time a user adds themselves as a follower of another user, a write occurs in the Realtime Database. Then this write event could trigger a function to create Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) notifications to let the appropriate users know that they have gained new followers.
The function triggers on writes to the Realtime Database path where followers are stored.
The function composes a message to send via FCM.
FCM sends the notification message to the user's device.
To review working code, see Send FCM notifications.
So i'm making an app using React JS, Cordova, node backend and a mongo database. I want to integrate firebase cloud messaging (FCM) into my platform. I'm quite new to firebase, and developing in general, and i'm not quite sure where to initialise firebase. I currently have it integrated into the front-end and it's requesting permission to receive notifications, generating tokens, and receiving messages from the firebase console. However i'm not entirely sure where to go from here. Do I add it to my backend as-well?
If you can receive messages in your client app, your front-end work is done for the moment.
But to send messages programmatically, you will need to write back-end code indeed. That's because sending messages through FCM requires that you specify the FCM server key to the API, and as its name implies that key should only be used in a trusted environment, such as your development machine, a server you control, or Cloud Functions.
For more on this, have a look at:
The architectural overview of FCM
The documentation on your server and FCM
My answer to How to send one to one message using Firebase Messaging
You have to get the FCM token from the frontend (or, client app).
After getting the token, just send it to your backend server using a POST method.
Then, store the token in whatever database you're using in your backend. It can be MongoDB, PostgreSQL, etc.
I'm using firebase as database. Flutter responds when any changes are made in cloud while using app, but will is respond the changes even when the app is in background or killed?
Second: is it possible to create notifications within the flutter app without using Firebase notification feature? Like a new document is added in database and app is suppose to create notification using some specific lib from pubdev.
When the user is not actively using the app, the OS (Android or iOS) allows a very limited amount of network activity from that app. For this reason you'll typically stop receiving updates from Firebase once the app is backgrounded, and you won't receive any updates as soon as it's killed.
If you want to show updates to the user when they're not using the app, that typically takes using Firebase Cloud Messaging. With this scenario you:
Set up custom server-side code that listens to the database. This code can run on your own server, but also for example on Cloud Functions.
When this code detects a change to the data, it sends a message to the relevant user(s) through Firebase Cloud Messaging.
This requires that the app registers itself either in your database (with its FCM token) or for a certain FCM topic to receive updates about.
For more on this, see the Firebase documentation on Cloud Messaging, Cloud Functions, my answer here and the FlutterFire docs.
I know how to send messages from Firebase cloud messaging portal to an android device. But my server runs on Google Cloud, I do gcloud app deploy from my local machine and the app logic gets deployed on Google Cloud. Now, I want to send notifications, based on the data stored as Entities in GCP Datastore, to an Android App.
Notification messages can be sent from Firestore-Cloud Messaging portal to an Android device, if I could harness this Firestore Cloud Messaging API in my GCP logic, then my problem will be solved.
I'm trying to look for any examples or POC's.
you can use Cloud Functions to add such custom functionality...
for example: https://android.jlelse.eu/serverless-notifications-with-cloud-functions-for-firebase-685d7c327cd4
and there are Cloud Datastore Callbacks, which can be used as event triggers. most relevant for Cloud Functions might be the Google Cloud Datastore Node.js Client - in order to connect to the Datastore. here's one of my examples, it is written in AppScript (similar to Node.js), which also connects to a Cloud Datastore, with the service account JSON loaded from Google Drive.
however, in this case the Datastore would need to subsequently trigger an HTTP Trigger or Pub/Sub Trigger and the code behind that trigger could get more data from the Datastore or directly send the Firebase notification.
in Cloud Function there are just triggers for Cloud Storage, while the Pub/Sub (publish/subscribe) triggers can be used for just anything. The Datastore would need to publish whatever event (add/edit/update/delete) - while a Cloud Functions script would need to subscribe these events.
using Firebase as backend might be less effort, because data-change events/triggers are being supported out-of-the-box, without any HTTP interaction or Pub/Sub communication involved.
Can we implement Firebase for an android app, where I am registering user using Mobile number (Similar to Whatsapp). Users will be sent a code by server which is entered by user in android app to validate the user mobile number and registering him on the server.
Question : Can I use the above method in conjunction with Firebase Auth?
I was earlier going to use MongoDB for my project, but since Firebase has SYNC capabilities, it will be a better choice for storing data. Another good reason is as below:
If a client loses its network connection, your app will continue
functioning correctly.
Every client connected to a Firebase database maintains its own
internal version of any active data. When data is written, it's
written to this local version first. The Firebase client then
synchronizes that data with the remote database servers and with other
clients on a "best-effort" basis.
Very NEW to Firebase, just came to know about firebase (through Google 2016 IO).
https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/android/save-data
Firebase hosting is not for server side processing.
It stores static assets of your website as a world-class high availability CDN. So websites hosted here loads very fast. Even in high-availability scenarios.
So you have to do processing at other server which then connects with firebase and stores userinfo in realtime database.
Firebase has put limits on userinfo to be placed in directly for users auth dashboard.
For detailed userinfo, firebase realtime db is the way to go(from your processing backend to firebase realtime db).
Further Reading: What kind of web applications are Firebase not ideal for?