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Calling any notification system

Tiago Pinho 1 Reputation point
2020-12-07T22:31:28.49+00:00

Dear Friends,

I'm finishing a webservices project in C# to help a local elementary school. The idea of the project is to read some parameters of the current school management software and make some communications to teachers and students.
Currently communications are being done by email, however this system is not the best to alert users on the spot, since we have users that don't consult the email every day. We are studying the possibility of having push notifications, but we are having a lot of difficulties. Starting with our budget, which unfortunately is very limited.
The idea would be to make notifications only for Android and iOS. We approach solutions like PushApp, PushOver or PushWoosh, however we have always found limitations in the number of users, or the number of daily notifications or similar. We also thought about using browser notifications, however we found the inconvenience of some less experienced users ignoring the notifications because they already have lots of notifications enabled for other pages. Therefore, the idea would be to have a way to activate the notifications with a specific sound so that any user could notice that that sound represents an important notification from the school.

It is at this stage that we are forced to ask for experienced help, and that can indicate us which way we should go, and if there are platforms that we can use to solve our problem.
The notification we want is quite simple, and the only thing that should be shown to the user is a simple text of 50 characters maximum and a link where the user will click and be redirected to a page. Please note that each notification should notify only one user and never a group of users. This notification should be called directly from our C# classes, through the call of an external webservices or any other solution that fits our C# project.

Thank you very much for your attention and time spent reading my post.

Xamarin
Xamarin
A Microsoft open-source app platform for building Android and iOS apps with .NET and C#.
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  1. JessieZhang-MSFT 7,706 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor
    2020-12-08T07:46:08.113+00:00

    Hello,

    Welcome to our Microsoft Q&A platform!

    According to your description, I suggest that you can try Firebase. Firebase is a back-end platform for building Web, Android, and iOS applications. It offers real-time database, Notifications, different APIs, multiple authentication types and hosting platform.

    You need to set up the Notification in specific Xamarin.Android project and Xamarin.iOS project.

    For Xamarin.Android:

    You can have a look at official document here and Remote Notifications with Firebase Cloud Messaging, there are step-by-step explanations of how to use Firebase Cloud Messaging to implement remote notifications (also called push notifications) in a Xamarin.Android application.

    For Xamarin.iOS:

    You can use Xamarin.Firebase.iOS.CloudMessaging to send iOS push notification by FCM.

    There are also steps here: Firebase Cloud Messaging on iOS

    Firebase document for push notification to native app is here: cloud-messaging

    Best Regards,

    Jessie Zhang

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