Local notifications in an Html5 powered iOS app(native)

Ok, so I have already written about why I decided to take the route of building an hybrid(Html5/Native) app, such that I get to know the native environment. So that post also mentions how I have built this Xcode starter project which can serve as a template for building html5 iOS apps using the Ionic framework.  Recently, I wrote about about how that initiative of mine helped someone. and what I have done now is created a branch, Notifications which provides some sample code for adding local notifications to the project. In this post, I am going to talk about what is in the Notifications branch.

Questions

1) Why build a Hybrid app such that I need to write some native code?
Well one of the reasons outlined in my previous post, was that I wanted my app to use local notifications. 


2) But scheduling local notifications is so simple, why add some sample code for it?
Yes scheduling local notifications is simple and this tutorial does a good job of showing how to do it. However when I started working on my first iOS app(My Day Todos), it was a little before mid-2014, so Xcode 6 was still in beta and there was not a lot of stuff for Swift out there.

Solution + explanation

When you run the code from the notifications branch in an iOS simulator or an iOS device, you will be presented with an interface, such as this.

As you can see I am working with a project template generated by using the command ionic start myApp tabs, which at the time generated something like what you see above. Also what you see above is screenshot of the code running in the Xcode simulator that has been rotated to the left. Now lets look at what all those above buttons do and the code that is run when you click on it

Each of the buttons above trigger a function in the Swift based View Controller using the techniques described in this post.

Schedule notifications for test

The purpose of this is just to schedule some local notifications. Clicking that buttons triggers the methods below

private func setTestNotifications(){
    var date = NSDate()
    //4 calls before this
    scheduleNotifications(date.dateByAddingTimeInterval(60), message: "5")
}

private func scheduleNotifications(date: NSDate, message: String) {
    let notification:UILocalNotification = UILocalNotification()
    notification.fireDate = date
    notification.timeZone = NSTimeZone.defaultTimeZone()
    notification.fireDate = date
    notification.soundName = UILocalNotificationDefaultSoundName
    notification.alertBody = message
    UIApplication.sharedApplication().scheduleLocalNotification(notification)
}

Cancel all notifications 

So this does exactly what you think it does i.e. it cancels all notifications. However, I do provide a commented out codesnippet in it, should you want to cancel a specific notification. 

private func cancelNotifications(){
 UIApplication.sharedApplication().cancelAllLocalNotifications()
 /*
 below is the code for cancelling specific notifications
 for n:AnyObject in UIApplication.sharedApplication().scheduledLocalNotifications {
    let not:UILocalNotification = n as UILocalNotification
    let alertBody = not.alertBody!
     if alertBody == "3" {
        UIApplication.sharedApplication().cancelLocalNotification(not)
      }
  }*/
}

Print notifications to console

Again, this does exactly what you would expect it to do i.e. it prints all the scheduled local notifications.

private func printNotifications(){
 for n:AnyObject in UIApplication.sharedApplication().scheduledLocalNotifications {
 let not:UILocalNotification = n as UILocalNotification
 println("alertBody:\(not.alertBody)")
 }
}

So what is next?

Well you are welcome to fork this repo, and you can also clone the repo and you can start working with the Notifications branch to get all that which I have outlined in this post.