Unable to prevent data-only Background notifications from displaying a notification (Android)

[tdous]

Using v.3.2.2 of RNN, and react-native 0.63. Didn't want to upgrade as right at the end of a build and don't want to switch version unnecessarily just yet.

We send pushes to display notifications for users, but also data-only notifications to trigger updates behind the scenes. I don't seem to be able to stop blank notifications from showing up in the notification tray. By which I mean the icon and app name, with no content (because there isn't any content to display).

I'm a little confused by a combination of the docs not mentioning much about the completion callback, and another Github issue that suggested the completion function is not correctly documented, so I might be missing something, or misusing that somehow...

The notification payload arriving via FCM looks like this:

{
  from: "XXXXXXXXXXXXX",
  google.c.sender.id: "XXXXXXXXXXXXX",
  google.delivered_priority: "normal",
  google.message_id: "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
  google.original_priority: "normal",
  google.sent_time: 1234567890000,
  google.ttl: 1234567,
  show: "false", // A setting which is used in the foreground, should be ignored in the background
  type: "update", // For filtering the type in the listener above
  action: "SOME_ACTION", // A sub-type, an action to trigger when in the foreground
}

And my listener looks something like this:

Notifications.events().registerNotificationReceivedBackground((
  notification: Notification,
  completion: (response: NotificationCompletion) => void
) => {
  switch (notification.payload.type) {
    // Some alert type to display in background
    case 'SOME_ALERT':
      completion({ alert: true, sound: true, badge: true });
      break;

    // Another type of alert to display
    case 'ANOTHER_ALERT_TYPE':
      // Maybe do something else here and then...
      completion({ alert: true, sound: true, badge: true });
      break;
    
    // THE PROBLEM - I have tried filtering this type, and different
    // formats of completion function, and also just leaving this
    // entire case out entirely, but the notification is always shown.
    case 'update':
      completion({ alert: false, sound: false, badge: false });
      // OR... completion(); - or no args, unclear what this does
      // OR... Something else to stop notifications from appearing??
      break;
  }
});

This is all going fine in the foreground, and the background notifications I do want to display are ok too. I'm just probably missing something obvious about how to handle (in my case ignore) these "hidden" pushes in the background. If anyone can point to my mistake or misunderstanding I'd be very grateful.

[tdous]

I couldn't find clarity on this myself, and since I built our backend push sending service a couple of years ago I wondered if it was sending stuff in a way that was triggering these incorrectly. However I've since switched over to react-native-firebase which is handling them as expected (ie. not displaying anything) so I'm happy there's no issue there. So while this is not closed as far as understanding why it was happening, it's closed for me as I'm not longer using this module. I'll just leave this in case anyone else has the problem and someone else can clarify for them.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs.

[mslipenchuk267]

not stale, Having the same issue

[menasSawwaf]

I have the same issue any update about this ??

[Plitzer]

Also the same issue, this is very problematic when using data-only notifications.
To add to this issue, if you specify the usual notification payload keys (title, body, ...) INSIDE the data payload, they will be picked up by the 'blank' notification as if it were a part of the notification payload.

e.g. setting the title to 'Hello' and the body to 'World' in the data payload will present a notification that says
Hello
World

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs.

[erkie]

go away stolebot

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs.

[mp8446]

Somebody found a solution for this?

[erkie]

I'm guessing it should be a pretty easy fix to just add an if-statement on this line, to not present empty notifications?

https://github.com/wix/react-native-notifications/blob/master/lib/android/app/src/main/java/com/wix/reactnativenotifications/core/notification/PushNotification.java#L151

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs.

[erkie]

stalebot unstale!

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs.

[stale]

The issue has been closed for inactivity.