Long time ago, I made a video on local
push notifications for Xamarin.Forms and now this plugin has been updated
for .NET MAUI and it has gained a ton of new features. So it's time
for an updated video. So just to go back a little bit, what
are local push notifications? Basically they are
push notifications. They look the same as push notifications, they smell the
same as push notifications, but kind of like the difference is
that net Maui local push notifications triggered from on your
device. So from inside of your app, instead of like a signal on the
outside from a server that is coming in, I have a whole video on what are
push notifications. So definitely go check that out. I highly recommend that you
do, but for this video, I'm going to look at a plugin that
will make it very, very easy to allow you to send local push notifications that, well, maybe
because you have some kind of alarm inside of your app, right? You're making an
app that has an alarm to wake people up or to drink enough water or
to go stand with their standing desk. I don't
know. You can send a local push notification. You don't need a server
for that. You can just schedule local push notifications.
It will show up at the time that you schedule it and you can
repeat it and you can do all these kinds of things and they will look and
feel the exact same as push notifications that are coming from a server. So
that's really cool. So a couple of things about this actual plugin, it is
supported by iOS and Android. So no Windows or Mac Catalyst at this
time. Hopefully we can change that in the future. And also I reached out
to Elvin or Tudaluga as his nickname says, for
at least iOS because I was testing it for this
demo. And for iOS you need permissions for the local push notifications,
push notifications in general. And the dialog to ask for the permission
didn't really come up. And he said like, hey, I need a little bit
more testing for iOS. Maybe I need some help for iOS. So if you are
someone who is passionate about open source, maybe
consider go helping him out on the repository. Maybe I can find some time
to help him out with some things that are in there. But
keep in mind that for iOS there might be some rough edges. For
Android, it mostly works fine from what I could find. So for iOS at least, you
want to probably implement something to ask the user for permissions for push
notifications and then you should be mostly good. Let's just go check out
what this plugin can do for you because it's pretty, pretty sweet. So here we
are in Visual Studio 2022. I just created a File, New .NET MAUI
application because this plugin is now ready for .NET MAUI. So that's
what we're going to show. And the first thing that you want to do is install
it on your project. So let's right-click on our project and let's go
to Manage NuGet Packages. Then you want to search for Plugin. LocalNotification So I think the name has changed a little bit
from when it was working with Xamarin, so be aware of that. And here it is
with a nice icon Plugin.LocalNotification by Elvin. I
see it's now pronounced Thudagala. So sorry for
that. And the time of recording the latest
version is 10.0.2. So let's just install that. And
while that's installing, you have to do okay for all the
things. I accept all the things. Of course, you have to read the
agreement there. And then it's going to install. Now, to actually initialize
the plugin, we're going to go to our
MauiProgram.cs. And what you want to do here is
somewhere in your builder, add the line, UseLocalNotification. And with the new Visual Studio
features, I think it adds it automatically to using if it does
not use IntelliSense or add using Plugin.LocalNotification yourself
and whenever you do that then boom, we have
UseLocalNotification and the plugin is ready to go. So that's it. That's how
easy it is. Now let's go to our MainPage.xaml and here I'm just going to reuse the UI that's
here because I'm just going to use that button basically to trigger some
code. Now, a good thing to note, you can also definitely use
this with MVVM. Actually, that initialization line that you just
saw registers a service, an interface that can do
everything with this local notification as well. So go
check out the repository for this plugin. It has all the
documentation or of course, let me know down in the comments below so I can make a
video just for you if you want to see how to do that. So let's
go here to this on counterclick. So we're going to go
to our MainPage.xaml.cs and I'm just going to remove all of
this code right here that I don't need because I want to do
something with this push notifications, right? So again, you probably want to
go here to the top and add using Plugin.Local Notifications, right, so that we have
access to all the APIs here. And whenever we do, we can now start
creating our push notifications. It's kind of like worked with a
notification request. So let's just say request = NotificationRequest. So there we have that and whenever we do, you can set a whole
bunch of properties, right? So let's start exploring with what's here. One
of the first things is the NotificationId. Now
that's important or not, kind of like
dependent on your use case. The notification ID is a unique ID that you can reference your notification by. So
with that you can cancel your notification. For instance, so I don't know if you
have a timer, but the timer has expired. You can say, hey,
notification ID this one. And I think the way to cancel it is if
you set the notification schedule to somewhere in the past, it will get
canceled, right? But you need to have that ID. So it can be important, but
it can also be just 1337, some arbitrary thing. Maybe you don't
need to set it at all, but that's how you can use this one.
Now, of course, you're going to need some kind of title, right? So we can
just say maybe want to subscribe to my channel, right?
Maybe that's a good title for a notification. And
what else do we got? You have a subtitle. You can put something in
there. Hello. I don't know. Let's just do something. And you also have a
description, right? So here is probably a good time to note that
not all properties work on all the platforms. So on iOS and
Android, I think Android has kind of like the most customizable
notifications. So there you might have the subtitle and the title and the description. For
iOS, I think you will only have the title and the description. So please
be aware of, you know, test it out, check the documentation on what
exactly is applicable here. But you know, just so you know that
not everything can show up in your notifications, maybe.
Another thing is an example of that, by the way, is your batch
number, right? So we can set this to ten or do 42 because the batch number
is also dependent on a version of Android that
you're running. I don't think it doesn't show actual values, but on iOS it
actually shows you the red bubble with like the 42 in it in this case,
right? And on Android it just shows you a little bubble that
something is going on, but it doesn't show you any content in there. So again, this is differences between the
platform that you can't really solve in a great way, but Elvin has done a great job in
making that as easy as possible, at least. So
there we have it. Same thing is kind of like the category type, I
think, which is something very specific. We have
category types, a none, a status, alarm, reminder. Depending on what it
is, it might look a little bit different, probably only on
Android for now. But you can specify a category. And here, this is
something that was much requested on my earlier video, is the schedule. So this is an API change from previous
versions and you can set a schedule. So this is how you're
going to schedule your notification. But this is now a complex object. So
we can set a new NotificationRrequestSchedule, right?
So what we can do here is do some more advanced
things. And the first thing is the notified time,
right? So we can set the notification time and let's make that date time.
Now add seconds, five. So I'm just going to
set this in like 5 seconds from whenever I push the
button, right? So we can see the result here. So with that in place but
you can also do it repeating, right? So maybe you have
something that you want to do by a specific interval or have the engagement from
the user so that whenever they haven't opened the app in like a
day or a week, then you can schedule this
notification. When they start the application, you probably want to set the notify
time a little bit longer and you can repeat a couple of things, right? And
then if they do open the app and other time then you can cancel it.
With that NotificationId and now you can reset it to somewhere in
the future, right? So that's a little free tip right here to get that user
engagement going. But you can set here the notification
AutoCancelTime. So it cancel it automatically after a
certain time as well. But you can also set the notify repeat interval, right? So you
can set a certain interval like, hey, how many
times or at what interval does it need to repeat? And now we can
suddenly say TimeSpan.From... I don't know, FromSeconds. So it will
repeat after seconds. That's probably not a good idea but FromDays. And you can
set do it every day, right? So every one day. And we have
more options here. You can also set some kind of repeat
type and you have some Android specific options. So I think if you do
not set the repeat interval, you can set the repeat type
here and we have daily, weekly. So it will kind of like set
that automatically. So it's kind of like more options to do the same kind of
thing. And with the interval you have a more finegrained control
over when it's going to repeat each time. So let's do that.
I'm not going to demo this because then the video will be a day long.
This might be a little bit too much, but trust me, go test it out.
This will repeat after one day. So this is kind of like where I want
to leave the demo at. But like I said, there's also specific
Android and iOS options. So let's put a comma right
here. And you have Android is and then you can set some kind of
Android specific options here, right? So Android is and what does
this need to be? Notification and Android
options. So if we set new Android options, we probably
need to import some new using here we go, using Plugin.LocalNotification.
AndroidOptions. And you have all these kinds of cool Android
specific options, right? Because the notifications for Android can do a lot
more at this time at least than iOS. You can set a progress
bar and you can net the progress on that
progress bar, right? You can set a channel, you can set the LED color. So if the
device has an LED, you can set the color for that. So there iOS,
all kinds of things, vibration patterns, all stuff that is
possible for Android and not for iOS, but for iOS, there's also
some stuff that's not possible for Android. So here you also have the
new iOS options, right? And we can set a couple of
things here as well. So I'm not going to go over all of
this. If you want to know more, please net me know down in the
comments and I will make follow up videos for you. So let's leave it at
this for now. The one last thing that we need to do is actually
schedule this notification, right? So we can use the LocalNotificationCenter for that, which is a static class, like I
mentioned. You can also dependency inject an instance of this
and you can use that to make it more dependency injection and
more friendly for your architecture current. And we have a couple of other things here as
well, right? So we can say clear with the notification ID list. So we
can clear notifications based on their ID. You can do clear
all, so just clear them all out. You can
check if notifications are enabled, yes or no. So there iOS, all
kinds of APIs here as well, to do check things and cancel
things and do all that. But what we want to do is
the show. And with the show we can put in a request. So
we put in our request that we've just created here
and with this we should be able to show our actual notification. So let's
deploy this application to our Android emulator. And now
whenever I click the button, it will schedule our notification for
5 seconds in the future and we should see it show
up. So here it is. Our application is being deployed and
here we are, our application iOS here. So if I do click me and I'm
going to net out of this application, then it's going to show
me that notification. So pay attention to here in the top bar. And
you can see that it comes with this icon, the icon. You can customize
it for Android, you totally can. But for now it's going to show me the
little dot. You can also here on the app icon. See the little bubble
here, right? The little batch. It doesn't
have that value, but you can see the batch. If I do my Notification
Center here or whatever it's called on Android, you can see subscribe to
my channel. Boom, there you are. And it says it's me. So you can see it
picks up the description, not the subtitle. I'm not really sure
you should check the documentation, how that all works when it doesn't
show up, yes or no? Oh, I can see the subtitle here. Hello. And you
can see it here, right? So you can see it here in the notification. So
this is all things that you can do and you can click it. And I think this
brings you back to the application, right? So that's how that works.
That's how you can schedule your first local notification. Now, before I let
you go, there's one other thing that I want to show you which is really cool
and you can hook into all kinds of events. So let's stop running here
for a moment and go to my constructor right here. And what
I can say here is again, Local NotificationCenter. Current.NotificationActionTapped or notification received or notifications disabled.
Right. And again, this is a little bit dependent on if you're
running on iOS or Android, which is going to work, yes or no. So please test
that out. Check out the documentation. But for the Notification action tab,
for instance, we can hook into something and we can check out
what the user did. Whoa, this is a big thing. This is something
in my visual studio because I blew up the font. So you can really
see it really well, but you can see this really well. Alright, so
let's just take this out of here. And it has generated
this new event handler for me, right? So with the event arcs,
I can do a couple of things. So I can check if e.IsDismissed or IsTapped, or you can
check the action ID because you can add action buttons
to your notification. A lot of people have asked for a video on
that. If you want to see a video, please let me know down in
the comments. And you can do all these things, right? So let's see if
you do is dismissed. I do know for sure that this one only
works on Android and you can do whatever. I'm just
going to put a breakpoint here. But you can do something, right? And else if
you can check e.IsTapped, right? So you can see
if the notification was actually tapped, yes or no. So let's put a
little breakpoint here. I'm going to rerun the application and now whenever we
dismiss the notification, for instance, it will show up here in
our code and you can do some kind of action with that. Now,
again, this only works on Android. For Android, I think
there's some kind of coupling between your app and this notification for iOS that
definitely doesn't happen. Your iOS notification cannot
really trigger any code inside of your application outside of the
action buttons that you can add. But there's all kinds of specifics
going on here, so it's a little bit more advanced. I click the button for
5 seconds. There should be a notification here. It comes up
again. So let's do this. Get this menu down here and whenever I
dismiss it here so I put it to the side, you can
see that my breakpoint gets triggered here and it says it is
dismissed is true. So now I can do all kinds of code here
for dismissing my notification. And that
is how you can get started with local notifications in .NET MAUI. Now,
while local notifications might seem very simple. There is a lot
to unpack here. Like I said, you can also add buttons
to your notifications so that users can automatically do actions inside of
your app. They can be taken to a specific page or they can, I don't
know. Some example is whenever I get a Twitter notification
from someone tweeting at me, I can pull it down and I have an
action button to actually like that tweet right, without going to go into
the app. So that's something that you can do with this. So you can
have these action buttons for like snooze the alarm or do all kinds of
things that make sense in your application. Also, you can style with
icons, with colors on Android. At least you can send
extra data together with you. There is a lot to go over
here, so please let me know down in the comments below what
you want to know. But be first, be sure to check out the documentation
on the wonderful repository of this project by Elvin. Of course,
as always with my videos, some people don't seem to be aware of
that. I have code samples for all the code that I write in my videos
on my GitHub account as well. So be sure to check that out. All the
links are down below in the video description or in the first
pinned comment down here. With that, please like this video so that more
people can benefit from all this local notification goodness. Because liking
it will spread it to more people on YouTube and that will help
grow my channel and support my channel for totally free. So that's
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