Notifications iOS

Configure push notifications via Helpshift

Helpshift enables you to send notifications to your users. This is particularly useful when you have multiple users on multiple platforms like iOS and Android. Notifications are useful to tell your users when you reply to an issue that they submitted. When the app is backgrounded, the notification that is sent from Helpshift appears as a notification.

Configure Helpshift's push notification service in the Helpshift admin interface

You can configure this in 4 simple steps:

Setup your application with Apple and enable Push notifications.

You need to generate certificates for APNS on Apple's portal that you can later provide to Helpshift. This lets Helpshift send push notifications to your users. Apple has moved away from old type of certificates to Apple Push Notification service SSL. There is another option to create Apple Push Notification Authentication Key, but Helpshift does not support this option yet. Its also possible that you still have the old type of certificate that has not yet expired, this is also supported by Helpshift.

Apple provides two variations of Apple Push Notification service SSL

• Apple Push Notification service SSL (Sandbox)
• Apple Push Notification service SSL (Sandbox & Production)

After creating your certificate, download it. Double click on it to import it to the Keychain Access Application. In the Keychain Access Application, right click on the certificate that was just added, and click export it in .p12 format. Please provide a password while exporting the certificate since we do not accept empty passwords. (Note that if your development private key is not present in Keychain Access, you will not be able to export it in .p12 format.)

To enable the Helpshift system to send push notifications to your users you will have to add iOS as a platform in your app (if you have not added already). And then click on the push notifications option.

After export, login and upload the .p12 file in your app in the Helpshift admin panel. Provide the same password you used while exporting to .p12 format.

Please note that you need to use the same bundle identifier in the app as the one you used to create the APNS certificate.

You can configure whether to send a badge or not, and sound alerts if you provided custom sounds bundled with your app to handle notifications. Save it and you're all set.

Development (Sandbox) mode vs. Production mode

When you build and run your app from Xcode, it is in development (Sandbox) mode. To test push notifications from Helpshift in this mode make sure you choose 'Development Mode' while uploading either of the above two certificate types.

When you publish your app and download from App Store, your app is in Production mode. To test push notifications from Helpshift in production mode make sure you choose 'Production Mode' while uploading a certificate of 'Apple Push Notification service SSL (Sandbox & Production)' type. Sandbox mode certificate will not work on a production environment.

We do not support using the same certificate for both sandbox and production apps. In these cases we recommend you create two separate apps on our dashboard, one in 'Production mode' and the other in 'Development mode'. While testing please use the credentials of the developement mode app. When you are ready to publish, please replace the credentials with those of the production level app.

Configure the Helpshift Unreal SDK to handle notifications

After you have configured the push notifications in the Helpshift console, you will need to add additional setup in the project, too. First of all, you should enable the Use Push Notifications toggle in the Project Settings:

On iOS, the push notifications are handled by the SDK itself, and no additional setup is required.

In-app notifications

In-app notifications, unlike push notifications, appear within your app when it is in use by the user.

These notifications are sent when an agent replies to a customer's issue. Your customers can click on these banners to go straight into the conversation screen.

Configuring In-app notifications

The Helpshift Init call supports flags for configuring SDK behaviour. Currently we support one flag i.e HelpshiftConfigEnableInAppNotificationsKey.

Enabling/Disabling In-app notifications

If you do not want the in-app notifications support provided by the Helpshift SDK, please set this flag to false. The default value of this flag is true i.e in-app notifications will be enabled.

Showing notification count when replies are sent to the user

To fetch unread messages count from the server you can call RequestUnreadMessageCount(bool FetchFromServer); API. This API will return unread messages count via delegate. Based on the value of FetchFromServer, the locally stored count will be returned if FetchFromServer is false else from the server by fetching remotely when FetchFromServer is true. An example use of this count is to update the badge count to indicate unread messsages. Please note that before calling this method, you need to set the listener for Helpshift events by calling the BindEventDelegate(const FHelpshiftEventDelegate& Callback) API.

When you call this API, you receive the unread count in your event delegate HelpshiftEventReceivedUnreadMessageCount() Keys in event data: HelpshiftEventDataMessageCount (int), HelpshiftEventDataMessageCountFromCache (int)

• The notification count is fetched via this API from the SDK cache and Helpshift's servers (indicated by the value of HelpshiftEventDataMessageCountFromCache (int) in the example above). However, the count from Helpshift’s servers is rate limited and it returns the value only if a subsequent call is made to the API, after the reset timeout or when the user just closes the chat screen (whichever is earlier). For an active issue, the reset timeout is 1 minute and 5 minutes for inactive issues.