Notification channel

There are two different views when rendering notification channels: Feed and Chat. Feed view shows all notifications in a list form while Chat view shows notifications in the form of a user-to-user group channel.

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The following table lists the differences between Feed view and Chat view.

A Feed view of the notification channel is composed of three components: header, notification list, and notification list status.

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The header component shows the title of the notification channel.

The notification list component shows a list of all notifications sent to the user.

The notification list status component shows the result of the data request for a notification list.

Chat UIKit Android for Notifications provides both activity and fragment to create a Feed view. You can choose which one to build your app with and you may solely use activity instead of fragment if you wish to. You can build a Feed view through FeedNotificationChannelActivity, which uses UIKitFragmentFactory to create views. The channel URL of the Feed notification channel can be found on Sendbird Dashboard under Notifications > Channels.

You can start an activity by using intent to move from one activity to FeedNotificationChannelActivity as shown below:

Intent intent = FeedNotificationChannelActivity.newIntent(context, "FEED_CHANNEL_CHANNEL_URL");
startActivity(intent);

FeedNotificationChannelActivity allows you to create a basic FeedNotificationChannelFragment through UIKitFragmentFactory and FeedNotificationChannelFragment.Builder. UIKitFragmentFactory has a set of methods that build each fragment, whereas the builder class provides APIs to customize the UI of the data and event handlers used in FeedNotificationChannelFragment.

FeedNotificationChannelFragment fragment = new FeedNotificationChannelFragment.Builder("FEED_CHANNEL_CHANNEL_URL").build();

Note: To use the UIKit's fragments as a nested fragment, refer to the Android Developer Documentation's Nested Fragments.

A green badge appears above the notification bubble when the current user receives a new notification in the Feed view. This badge is displayed based on the feed's last read time value at the time of view creation. However, this time value remains the same while the Feed view is on foreground, which prevents the badge from disappearing even if the user's already seen the notification. If you want to update the last read time value, see the code below.

// Retrieve the Feed notification channel fragment.
// This is the fragment that you used to create the Feed view.
NotificationChannelFragment fragment = getNotificationChannelFragment();

// Updates to the last read time value on the channel.
notificationFragment.updateLastReadTimeOnCurrentChannel();

If you've authenticated to the Sendbird server by calling SendbirdUIKit.authenticateFeed(), there's no WebSocket connection between the UIKit and the Sendbird server. Due to the lack of connection, the UIKit can't receive real-time events to notify the user with updated information about the feed channel.

The UIKit will automatically refresh the notification collections when the client app is brought to foreground or when the device's network connection has changed. In the case that the collection information is received as a push notification from the client app, you can refresh the content of all valid notification collections.

Note: NotificationCollection is valid only if the isLive flag is set to true.

SendbirdChat.refreshNotificationCollections();
// The content of the notification collection has been refreshed.

A Chat view of the notification channel is composed of three components: header, notification list, and notification list status.

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The header component shows the channel title, channel image, and a back button that takes the user to the previous view.

The notification list component shows a list of all notifications.

The notification list status component shows the result of the data request for a notification list.

Chat UIKit Android for Notifications provides both activity and fragment to create a Chat view. You can choose which one to build your app with and you may solely use activity instead of fragment if you wish to. You can build a Chat view through ChatNotificationChannelActivity, which uses UIKitFragmentFactory to create views. The channel URL of the Chat notification channel can be found on Sendbird Dashboard under Notifications > Channels.

You can start an activity by using intent to move from one activity to ChatNotificationChannelActivity as shown below:

Intent intent = ChatNotificationChannelActivity.newIntent(context, "CHAT_NOTIFICATION_CHANNEL_URL");
startActivity(intent);

ChatNotificationChannelActivity allows you to create a basic ChatNotificationChannelFragment through UIKitFragmentFactory and ChatNotificationChannelFragment.Builder. UIKitFragmentFactory has a set of methods that build each fragment, whereas the builder class provides APIs to customize the UI of the data and event handlers used in ChatNotificationChannelFragment.

ChatNotificationChannelFragment fragment = new ChatNotificationChannelFragment.Builder(“CHAT_NOTIFICATION_CHANNEL_URL”).build();

Note: To use the UIKit's fragments as a nested fragment, refer to the Android Developer Documentation's Nested Fragments.