iPhone Push Notifications

iPhone Push Notification Testing:

Testing out the interaction after receiving a remote push notifications on the iphone can be very annoying. Apple does not make it easy to setup remote push notifications. Plus development time is much slower if you try to build and test this interaction while waiting for remote notifications. And unfortunately Apple doesn’t provide a way to test out remote notifications on the simulator.

So instead of using a remote notification I used a local notification for testing this interaction.
In your UIApplication delegate instead of using this delegate method:

- (void)application:(UIApplication *)application 
     didReceiveRemoteNotification:(NSDictionary *)userInfo

I used this:

- (void)application:(UIApplication *)application 
        didReceiveLocalNotification: (UILocalNotification *)notification

You can then schedule a local notification (Apple Docs). This will then simulate receiving a notification when you are in the app.

To simulate the notification when the app isn’t in the foreground I created a local notification inside the delegate method:

-(void)applicationDidEnterBackground:(UIApplication *)application.  

I set it up so as soon as you closed the app the notification would fire showing the default alert box.

Here is the code I used to create the local notification inside the DidEnterBackground method.

NSDate *nowDate = [NSDate date];
NSTimeInterval seconds = 0;
NSDate *newDate = [nowDate dateByAddingTimeInterval:seconds];

UILocalNotification *localNotif = [[UILocalNotification alloc] init];
if (localNotif != nil)
{
  localNotif.fireDate = newDate;
  localNotif.timeZone = [NSTimeZone defaultTimeZone];

  localNotif.alertBody = @"You have new notifications";
  localNotif.alertAction = NSLocalizedString(@"View", nil);

  localNotif.soundName = UILocalNotificationDefaultSoundName;
  localNotif.applicationIconBadgeNumber = 2;

  NSDictionary *infoDict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:@"2" 
       forKey:@"NewNotifications"];
  localNotif.userInfo = infoDict;

  [[UIApplication sharedApplication] scheduleLocalNotification:localNotif];
  [localNotif release];
}

When you click the “View” button on the alert box, the application will come to the foreground and the didReceiveLocalNotification will be called. You can then do what you need to do based on what data you passed to it via the NSDictionary object in the local notification.

So the main difference in your code between the local and remote notification is that in the local notification you’ll have to access the data you sent to it with [notification userInfo] and in the remote notification, the dictionary object is what is passed to it.