Notification Hubs enabling APNS priority for pushes to iOS devices

Apple Push Notification Services added “apns-priority” to its notification send request headers a while back for users to specify send priorities with ten marking immediate and high-priority sends and five marking device power saving sends. We want to share a few sample snippets for how to use this feature with Notification Hubs' .NET SDK.

To push without templates, simply set the X-Apns-Priority property in the notification headers before you send the push request.

var notification = new AppleNotification(@"
{
  ""aps"": {
    ""content-available"": 1
  },
  ""data"": {
    ""key"": ""value""
  }
}");
notification.Priority = "5";

await notificationHubClient.SendNotificationAsync(notification);

To perform template push using template Registration model, you can set the apns-priority either in the device registration itself or during the sending process depending on your scenario.

If you prefer linking the apns-priority to the templates themselves, add priority value to your registration.

var registration = new AppleTemplateRegistrationDescription(
  "deviceToken",
  @"{
    ""aps"": {
      ""content-available"": 1
    },
    ""data"": {
      ""key"": ""$(Message)""
    }
  }");

registration.Priority = "10";
await notificationHubClient.CreateRegistrationAsync(registration);

If you want flexibility over apns-priority as you send to templates, add a placeholder for it and specify the priority during send.

// Template registration with priority expression
var registration = new AppleTemplateRegistrationDescription(
  "deviceToken",
  @"{
    ""aps"": {
      ""alert"":""New notification!""
    }
  }");
registration.Priority = "$(Priority)";

await notificationHubClient.CreateRegistrationAsync(registration);

To specify priority on send:

var notification = new TemplateNotification(new Dictionary()
{
  {"Priority", "10"}
});
await notificationHubClient.SendNotificationAsync(notification);

Try it out and let us know what you think!