Can push notification be sent without an alert for certain actions?

Question

I know you can register to have alerts or not when you call the push notification API. However my problem is that I want a certain class of actions to have an alert notification while no alert notification for other class of action?

So for example, an alert should be shown when we send the notification "Heart rate dropping alert!". But no alert should be shown when we send the notification "downloading updated patient data", the app should just take the notification as an instruction to being download if it is launched. And simply ignore it if it is not launched.

How to implement this?

Answer 1

Not possible. Push notifications cannot initiate tasks - nothing can cause an app to execute without user action. Similar question to http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1527113. You can trigger a sound, a text alert, or a badge value. That's it.

Answer 2

You can embed custom JSON data in the push notification, look at The Notification Payload in the Apple docs.

Update: I don't think that quite answers your question. You can send a blank notification that has the effect of cancelling any previous push notification (including those from other applications). I'm not sure if the app gets notified of that when it is actually running. If it does you might be able to do that in conjunction with a custom JSON payload to achieve what you want?

{"aps": {"badge": 0}}

You probably know this already - you can't use a push notification to launch the app on the iPhone without the user seeing a popup (apps can never run in the background on the iPhone).

However, you can display a different popup message and include different JSON data in the notification. Then if the user presses the button to launch the app ("Start", or whatever you call the button on the right) that JSON data is passed into the app. Your app can then carry out a different action based on that data.