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Design | Notifications | Templates
Design | Notifications | Templates

Notify your users of important events

John Harley avatar
Written by John Harley
Updated over a year ago

Using Notification Templates allows you to send short messages that draw users back into your app. 

You can create these notification templates on the brainCloud portal.

Templates can be linked to Promotions, so they pop when you run a sale. Templates can also be easily linked to Tournament events via the Design | Leaderboards | Tournament Templates | Notifications tab. You can also manually send a notification to All your players or a selected group of players defined in Design | Segmentation | Segments

If your app is LIVE, you will need to Unlock to Edit. Select the Green Lock in the App Is Live banner. 

Enter your brainCloud credentials. The banner will update to show the app is Unlocked for editing. 


To Create a new message, choose +Create. The Add Notification panel appears. 

  • Enter a Name and a message to send. 

  • The messages can be localized to every user-facing language your app chooses to support.

  • You can also substitute arguments in the template. For example, if your app requires sending a reminder for the user to pick up an item at a specific time, the template could be created in this format. "Reminder to pick up {0} at {1}."  Where {0}, {1], ..., values are substituted for given text values.

Example of sending a templated notification to an end-user, from the API Explorer.

  • Be sure to click [Save] when you are done creating the notification message.


Note: To Send Notifications, ensure you have set up notification certificates for your selected platforms in the Design | Notifications | Settings page. 

Once your message is ready, you can test sending the notification. Caution: If your app is Live, you probably do not want to test notifications by sending them to All Users. Define a For Testers Only Segment and select that segment from the dropdown list offered when you hit the Send Now button. More on that on the Segment page. 

After adding a Notification to a live app, it is best practice to Lock the app after you are done making your changes. 

Click the Lock icon in the Warning bar

Writing the code

Besides manually triggering with the brainCloud portal, you can also schedule cloud jobs, or write a script in your app to trigger the templated notification.

As an example, from your app, can send a notification back to the current end-user, to remind them about an event.

In your client code

  • Add the brainCloud client to your app

  • Pair the client with the dashboard

  • Authenticate your user into brainCloud

  • Write your custom logic that would require a templated notification

  • Send the push notification using ScheduleRichPushNotificationMinutes

  • Handle the notification rendering, if required by the given platform

  • Review other achievement-related calls for your app in the API Reference

void Start() {
    // Unity
    GameObject go = new GameObject();
    _bc = go.AddComponent<BrainCloudWrapper>();
    _bc.WrapperName = _wrapperName; // optionally set a wrapper-name
    _bc.Init(); // extra data, such as: _appId, _secret and _appVersion, is taken from the brainCloud Unity Plugin.
    DontDestroyOnLoad(go); // keep the brainCloud game object through scene changes
 
    _bc.AuthenticateAnonymous((response, cbObject) => { CustomAppLogic(); });
}
 
void CustomAppLogic() {
    // TODO handle your custom app logic that would require a notification to be triggered
    // UserSetReminderFor("coffee", "6pm");
 
    var subsitutionsJson = "{\"0\":\"coffee\", \"1\":\"6 pm\"}";
    var minutesFromNow = 60 * 3;
    var currentEndUser = _bc.Client.ProfileId;
         
    _bc.PushNotificationService.ScheduleRichPushNotificationMinutes(currentEndUser, 1, subsitutionsJson, minutesFromNow,
        (response, cbObject) =>
        {
            Debug.Log("Notification will occur in " + minutesFromNow + " minutes.");
        });
}
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