Mocking User Notifications

Detox supports mocking user notifications.

Note: The mocking mechanism will not mimic the UI of a user notification. Instead, it will only simulate a user interaction with the notification - namely, the "opening" of it (equivalent to a user’s tap/swipe on it in the notification center).

Mocking App Launch With a Notification

launchApp() with custom parameters (i.e. userNotification) will trigger the mocking mechanism.

await device.launchApp({newInstance: true, userNotification: notification});

Example

describe('Launch with push notification', () => {
  it('should handle the notification', async () => {
    await device.launchApp({
      newInstance: true,
      userNotification: userNotificationPushTrigger,
    });
    await expect(element(by.text('From push'))).toBeVisible();
  });
});

Mocking Notification Reception on a Running App

Use the sendUserNotification() method to send notification to running app. Notifications can be sent to an active or a background app.

Note: while the name sendUserNotification() is not very idiomatic on Android, as notification data is not "sent" to apps (rather, it is bundled into an Activity/Service launch Intent as Intent-extras), this unified API is used, for the time being, for both platforms equivalently. With plans of a more extensive support for Android, we estimate it would be deprecated when the time comes.

await device.sendUserNotification(notification);

Example:

describe('Foreground user notifications', () => {
  it('should handle the local notification from inside the app', async () => {
    await device.launchApp();
    await device.sendUserNotification(localNotification);
    await expect(element(by.text('from local notification'))).toBeVisible();
   });
});

Notification JSON Format

User notifications are passed as JSON objects to Detox. The JSON object needs to provide some required data, but can also provide an additional, optional payload.

Mind the major difference here between the two platforms. While on iOS many types of data fields are applicable, Android is very loosely defined - with support for just free-form user data in the payload field.

Key	Required	Value Type	Platform	Description
trigger	Yes	Object	iOS	The conditions that trigger the delivery of the notification. See the Triggers section below.
title	No	String	iOS	A short description of the reason for the alert.
subtitle	No	String	iOS	A secondary description of the reason for the alert.
body	No	String	iOS	The body of the notification.
badge	No	Integer	iOS	The number to display as the app’s icon badge.
payload	iOS: No Android: Yes	Object	iOS & Android	An object of custom information associated with the notification. Android: see full description below
category	No	String	iOS	The identifier of the app-defined category object.
content-available	No	Integer	iOS	Include this key with a value of 1 to configure a silent notification.
user-text	No	String	iOS	The text response provided by the user.
action-identifier	No	String	iOS	The identifier for the action that the user selected.

Triggers (iOS-only)

Triggers are objects representing the trigger.

Key	Required	Value Type	Description
type	Yes	String	The conditions that trigger the delivery of the notification. See the Trigger Types section below.
repeats	No	Boolean	Indicates whether the event repeats. Only used for calendar, timeInterval and location trigger types.
timeInterval	Yes for timeInterval trigger type	Number	The time interval used to create the trigger.
date-components	Yes for calendar trigger type	Object	The date components used to construct this object. See the Date Components section below.
region	Yes for location trigger type	Object	The region used to determine when the notification is sent. See the Region section below.

Trigger Types

There are four types of triggers supported by Detox at this time:

• push
• calendar
• timeInterval
• location

For convenience, these trigger types are provided as constants in DetoxConstants:

const DetoxConstants = require('detox/index').DetoxConstants;

const userNotification = {
  "trigger": {
    "type": DetoxConstants.userNotificationTriggers.push
  },
  // ...
}

Date Components (iOS-only)

Key	Required	Value Type	Description
era	No	Integer	The number of era units for the receiver.
year	No	Integer	The number of year units for the receiver.
month	No	Integer	The number of month units for the receiver.
day	No	Integer	The number of day units for the receiver.
hour	No	Integer	The number of hour units for the receiver.
minute	No	Integer	The number of minute units for the receiver.
second	No	Integer	The number of second units for the receiver.
weekday	No	Integer	The number of the weekday unit for the receiver.
weekdayOrdinal	No	Integer	The ordinal number of weekday units for the receiver.
quarter	No	Integer	The number of quarters for the receiver.
weekOfMonth	No	Integer	The week number of the month for the receiver.
leapMonth	No	Boolean	Indicates whether the month is a leap month.

Region (iOS-only)

Key	Required	Value Type	Description
center	Yes	Object	The center point of the geographic area. See the Coordinate section below.
radius	Yes	Number	The radius (measured in meters) that defines the geographic area’s outer boundary.
notifyOnEntry	No	Boolean	Indicates that notifications are generated upon entry into the region.
notifyOnExit	No	Boolean	Indicates that notifications are generated upon exit from the region.

Coordinate (iOS-only)

Key	Required	Value Type	Description
latitude	Yes	Number	The latitude in degrees. Positive values indicate latitudes north of the equator. Negative values indicate latitudes south of the equator.
longitude	Yes	Number	The longitude in degrees. Measurements are relative to the zero meridian, with positive values extending east of the meridian and negative values extending west of the meridian.

Payload

On Android, the content will be available via the activity’s getIntent() API, inside the intent’s extra bundle. Under some limitations, that includes data-cascading so as to provide comprehensive support for JavaScript’s advanced object-hierarchy capabilities as much as possible. As an example, consider this payload:

const userNotification = {
  payload: {
    userData: 'userDataValue',
    userDataNum: 111.2,
    userDataFlag: true,
    userDataArray: ['rock', 'paper', 'scissors'],
    userDataObj: {
      cascadedKey: 'cascadedValue'
    },
  },
};

The outcome on the native side will be such that all of these conditions evaluate to true:

activity.getIntent().getStringExtra("userData") == "userDataValue";
activity.getIntent().getDoubleExtra("userDataNum") == 111.2;
activity.getIntent().getBooleanExtra("userDataFlag") == true;
activity.getIntent().getStringArrayExtra("userDataArray")[0] == "rock";
activity.getIntent().getBundleExtra("userDataObj").getString("cascadedKey") == "cascadedValue";

Handling at Runtime

Note that on Android, data delivered through an intent at runtime, is typically received in your activity’s onNewIntent callback. Be sure to consider what should be done in order to handle this type of a use case in your app: Namely, that setIntent() should be called in order for the data to be later available in your app through getIntent(), as explained earlier.

This isn’t related to Detox in particular, and is set here simply to help you consider all the use cases in your app so that tests coverage would be optimal.

Examples

1. Calendar Trigger
2. Location Trigger
3. Time Interval Trigger
4. Push Trigger