PushNotifications: Upgrade to FCMv1 is not delivering Templated Notifications from Azure

@Smitha Kalluparambil : What is "The new SDK" you are referring to. I can't find a new Version of Microsoft.Azure.NotificationHubs. The latestest one is still 4.2.0.

@Andreas Leitel MS made server side changes on their end. there is no new nuget package. its the same version of SDK. 4.2.0

We tested the app in stage by setting istestEnabled = false and got the notification on the test device with a status of Enqueued

We used powershell to send out templated notification. Then we used our .net code to test the same and got a notification.

$client = [Microsoft.Azure.NotificationHubs.NotificationHubClient]::CreateClientFromConnectionString($cn,"username",$false)
$installation = $client.GetInstallation('XXXXX');
$templateParameterDictionary = New-Object 'System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary[[string], [string]]'
$templateParameterDictionary.Add("message", "This is a test messge. Please ignore.")
$NotificationOutcome = $client.SendTemplateNotificationAsync( $templateParameterDictionary, '$InstallationId:{XXXX}').Result
$NotificationOutcome

Then we pushed our code changes to point to new template and code change for Gcm to FcmV1 to PROD.

Tested out one installation id using powershell and then the our new code (with the 4.2 SDK)

Hope this helps.

@Smitha Kalluparambil
First - thanks a lot!

The point is, we did now basically what you did... going back to the basics by sending a very, very simple message - and by doing so, we were able to send simple templated notifications. So far so good.

The second problem that prevented us from sending a bit more complex notifications was a "migration/backward compatibility" issue. With "FCM legacy", the "data" payload was allowed to contain nested child "data" objects such as :

"notification": {...}
"data": {
  nestedData:{
    property1: "${PROP1}"
    property2: "${PROP2}"
  }
}

With FCMv1 this doesn't work any more. The exact reason isn't known. Either the template parsing changed at NotificationHub or Google Firebase FCMv1 doesn't allow such nested structures any more.

The solution is to flatten those nested structures.

We didn't find any "breaking changes" documentation about that "nesting data" thing, neither at google nor at MS.

@Smitha Kalluparambil : I only see you mention that you are able to send FCMv1 templated messages. But are you also able to send Test/debug messages? Are you able to send with isTestEnabled=true?

Because, if I understand @ajkuma correctly, that is what the bugfix should fix. Sending with isTestEnabled = false was already working before a fix was mentioned.

@Anonymous : Did I understand that correctly? Is the fix you mentioned supposed to fix sending messages with isTestEnabled=true? And also to be able to send test messages from the NotificationHub GUI? Is the fix rolled out yet to all regions?

I'm still unable to successfully send a message to an FCMv1 template installation with the &test tag in the REST API's querystring.

If the bug fix wasn't supposed to fix sending test messages, what does it fix?

@Dick Nagtegaal - de Vries Earlier before this bug fix, even after IsTestEnabled = false, i was not able to get a notification. So i changed my code to now have IsTestEnabled = false for good.

@Smitha Kalluparambil We have this issue still exists for us, as MS mentioned this as phase wise roll out, can you please help on the region where you have your notification hub where the fix is working?

@srilatha cingireddy EastUS

Is there any way to determine whether this fix has been deployed to a Hub?

We still see this problem (North Europe), it does seem to be intermittent however.

What exactly is the bug that has been fixed? Should the bug make it possible to do a templated send using EnableTestSend = true?

@Smitha Kalluparambil Thank you! The fix should be SendTemplateNotificationAsync working as is for FCM v1 without any modifications? like it is use for FCM Legacy

@Smitha Kalluparambil Thank you! the fix should be SendTemplateNotificationAsync should support FCM v1 as is the way it use to support FCM Legacy right? Like without any modifications

@srilatha cingireddy you have to update to the latest sdk and change the template to the new template.

Having gone through 2 rounds of testing on pre-production environments we only hit the problem after rolling out to our production environment.

Our setup seems to be very similar to the OP's where we've updated all our existing GCM installations to FCMV1 using a powershell script. Whenever we include one of the templates in a tagExpression no matches are found e.g. "mytemplate && user:123" does not work but "user:123" does.

We seem to have found a workaround that works in our case.

Taking the OP's tag expression:

var tagExpression = "t-incident && env:dev && principal:C4E4CEB3-0E0D-446A-B5CF-73B2957745C0 && version:V4"

and changing it to the following (where xxx can be any string not previously used as a tag):

var tagExpression = "(t-incident||xxx) && env:dev && principal:C4E4CEB3-0E0D-446A-B5CF-73B2957745C0 && version:V4"

Subsequent send template notification requests now succeed in generating notifications

@Smitha Kalluparambil Thank you for the response. Below is the way we have implemented for FCM which is not supported by FCM v1. Not sure what is the change in the template which is referred. we are not using any tag expressions rather only tags.

@srilatha cingireddy

Where you are creating instance of new AzureInstallation() and assigning the templates and platform to it you also assign the template. Look up the template and change it to the new one. check this one https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging/migrate-v1#example-simple-notification-message

var azureInstallation = new AzureInstallation

{

InstallationId = "",

Platform =  FcmV1,

Templates = (HERE)

};

We were able to get this working but had to take everything out of the "Notification" object beside the title and body. Will support for "sound" and "notification_priority" be added to the "Notification" object?