We are going to do a quick tutorial today on how we can generate notifications in Android. Although the standard Android Guide does explain it, but I dont think its a very quick way to understand stuff.
So here we go.
Here are the basic steps –
- Create a notification channel
- Build a notification
- Send a notitification.
How do we create a notitification channel, we do it simply by keeping in mind that we need a unique channel id(“1000111”) and channel name(“cld_notif_channel”). The values do not matter, however they need to be unique.
| private void createNotificationChannel() { | |
| if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= Build.VERSION_CODES.O) { | |
| NotificationChannel channel = new NotificationChannel("1000111", "cld_notif_channel", NotificationManager.IMPORTANCE_DEFAULT); | |
| channel.setDescription("cld_notif_desc"); | |
| NotificationManager notificationManager = getSystemService(NotificationManager.class); | |
| notificationManager.createNotificationChannel(channel); | |
| } | |
| } |
The notitification channel can be invoked as many number times as required, although once invoked and available it will just not create another if its already present. I would suggest to create your notitification channels as soon as your application opens.
The way you do it is simply by calling the createNotificationChannel() function in your Main Activity.
Step 2 involves creating the notification itself. There are few basic things we need to take care of, it must have a Small Icon available, this one is mandatory along with the Channel Id, which we created above.
| final NotificationCompat.Builder builder = new NotificationCompat.Builder(this, "1000111") | |
| .setContentTitle("Notification Title") | |
| .setSmallIcon(R.drawable.ic_stat_name) | |
| .setContentText("Notification Text") | |
| .setPriority(NotificationCompat.PRIORITY_DEFAULT); |
Step 2.5 involves creating a notification manager which is actually going to be responsible for sending out notifications.
| final NotificationManagerCompat notificationManager = NotificationManagerCompat.from(this); |
Step 3 involves obviously firing the notification and sadly this again requires a unique id(“1001”) to uniquely identify the notification and send it.
| notificationManager.notify("1001", builder.build()); |
And there you go, its so simple it hardly would take 10 minutes of your time to learn how to send notifications in your Android application.
*Note – where you see *this* that is android.content.Context so this goes inside your class for the activity.
Analects of an Otaku 