Implementing an in-app notification page in FlutterFlow

‍Introduction

An in-app notification page is a feature found in almost all popular apps. It allows users to see their most recent notifications within the app and click on them to navigate to specific pages. This feature adds to the user experience by enabling them to manage their past behavior on the app and making notifications more valuable since users can still see them even if they have deleted the original notification.

Our in-app notification page, now available on the FlutterFlow Marketplace, offers a robust and easy-to-integrate solution. In this blog, we will go over the basics of how it works.

How it works

Whenever you send a notification in FlutterFlow, you create a document inside the “ff_user_push_notifications” collection. FlutterFlow’s Cloud Function then sends the actual notification. To keep track of these notifications in-app, we need to monitor this collection. However, FlutterFlow does not allow direct creation of this collection, so we must replicate data from it into our collection.

Steps to implement the notification tracker

1.   Create a separate collection for notifications

First, set up a new collection in your backend to store notification data. This collection will replicate the data from“ff_user_push_notifications”.

2.   Cloud Function for data replication

Create a Cloud Function that listens to changes in the “ff_user_push_notifications” collection and replicates those changes into your new collection.

3.   Parse notification data

Ensure that each notification stored in your new collection includes all necessary data, such as the message, timestamp, and any parameters required to redirect the user to the correct page within the app.

4.   Display notifications in the app

Create a page in your FlutterFlow app that fetches data from your new collection and displays a list of notifications. Each notification item should include a click action to redirect the user to the appropriate page.

5.   Track notification status

Add functionality to mark notifications as read or opened. This can be done by updating a field in your collection whenever a user clicks on a notification.

Conclusion

Implementing an in-app notification page in FlutterFlow can improve user engagement and experience by allowing users to access important notifications even if they miss the original alerts. By following the steps outlined in this blog, you can quickly integrate this feature into your app.For a more robust and ready-to-use implementation, check out our solution on the FlutterFlow Marketplace. The marketplace item has all aspects of the implementation covered, including the Cloud Function, the custom functions and the logic for navigating to pages and parsing the data.