Configure the Push Channel using the Experience Platform Mobile SDK

In this video, I’m going to show you how to configure and install the Adobe Experience Platform Mobile SDK so that you can send and track push notifications to your mobile app from Adobe Campaign Classic. Now before we get to the SDK itself, we’ll need to create a service for our mobile application in Campaign Classic. So in the Campaign console, we’ll go to profiles and targets and services and subscriptions and click create. Define a label, we’ll call it ACC Push Demo and then go to the type field and select mobile application.

Then we’ll click the add button to add each version of our mobile application, iOS and Android. I’ll demonstrate this for iOS, but Android will be very similar.

So first enter a label for the mobile app version. We can call it ACC Push Demo iOS. And then application variables is where you can specify any custom payload fields that you want to include in push notifications to the iOS app. These should include any payload fields that your iOS application would use in handling and displaying notifications. For example, you may want to add a field for passing in a media attachment URL for rich notifications.

Then in the subscription parameters tab, you have the option to specify additional parameters that will be included when registering mobile app users in Campaign. So to do this, click the add icon, enter the parameter name. This should match the key name used by the mobile developer to pass in additional parameters when calling the mobile SDK’s registered device API in the app code. Then in the destination field, you’ll map the parameter to its corresponding field in the subscriber application schema.

In the sounds tab, you can add the names of any custom notification sounds that you use in your app. And then click next.

Now this page in the dialogue you’ll go through twice, first, for the sandbox or develop version of your app, and then again for the production version. First, you’ll want to note the value of the integration key that is generated by Campaign for the development version of your iOS app. You will need this when configuring the mobile SDK in Adobe Launch. Then you have the option to add an application icon to be used when previewing notifications.

Finally, you’ll upload the P12 development certificate for your iOS app and enter the password for the certificate. You can obtain the certificate file and password from your mobile app developer. Once you’ve uploaded the certificate, click the test the connection button to verify that the certificate and password are valid. We’ll then repeat the same steps for the production version of the iOS app. You’ll have different certificates for the development and production versions of your app, so make sure that you upload the correct certificate for each version. And also, note that the integration keys will be different for the sandbox and production versions of your iOS app. And when you’re done with the production version of your app, click finish. And then I can click add and go through a similar set of steps to configure the Android version of my app. And when I’m all done, I’ll click save.

And now I’m ready to configure and install the mobile SDK in Adobe Launch. When we go to the Launch UI, we’ll first see a list of existing web and mobile properties. We’ll create a new mobile property for our app by clicking new property in the upper right. Provide a name. We can call it ACC Push Demo.

And then be sure to select mobile as the platform. You can leave everything else as it is and click save. This will take us back to the properties list, where we’ll see the new property we’ve created. So we’ll click on that new property, and we’ll go to the extensions tab.

You’ll see the Mobile Core and Profile extensions, which are installed by default. You won’t need to do anything else to configure those, but we do want to add support for Campaign Classic push messaging. So for that, we’ll go click catalog, find the Adobe Campaign Classic extension, and click install.

That will take us to the configuration page for the Campaign Classic extension, where you’ll enter the registration and tracking endpoint URLs for your Campaign instance and the integration keys for the iOS and Android versions of the mobile application service that we just created in Campaign.

You can specify up to three different sets of Campaign endpoints and integration keys to be used for development, stage, and production versions of the mobile application. Your registration and tracking endpoints can be obtained from your organization’s Campaign administrator.

So for the development environment, I’ll go ahead and enter the registration and tracking endpoints for my demo instance of Campaign and the Campaign integration keys for my iOS sandbox app and Android app.

And then for this demo, I’m just going to use the same endpoints and integration keys for each development phase. But if you have multiple instances of Campaign and want to use different instances or different services within an instance for the different phases of your mobile app development, you can fill out the configuration page accordingly. And once we’re done, we’ll click save. And then we’ll see the Adobe Campaign Classic extension among our list of SDK extensions.

So now we’ll go to the publishing tab to save and build our SDK configuration.

Under the development section of the publishing workflow, I’ll click add a new library. We’ll give it a name and specify it as a development environment.

Then I’ll click add all changed resources and then click save and build for development.

So now that we’ve published the SDK configuration for our development environment, it’s ready to be installed in a development version of our mobile app. Later on once we’ve confirmed that the SDK’s installed and working as expected, you can go through the rest of this publishing workflow and build the SDK for staging and QA testing and then ultimately for production.

So to install the SDK in your mobile app, you can go to the environments tab and click on the package icon under the install column for the development environment. This will display a dialogue box with instructions for installing the development version of the SDK library in your mobile app. For iOS, for example, you can install the SDK via CocoaPods. And you’ll see instructions for adding the pods and the code that your mobile developer will need to add to import and initialize the SDK. For Android, you’ll find similar instructions for importing the SDK via Gradle.

In addition to the code display here for importing and initializing the SDK, your mobile developer will also need to add calls to the SDK’s registered device and track notification APIs at the appropriate places in the app code. You can find details for these APIs in the SDK documentation.

And once your mobile developer has added the necessary lines of code to your app, you’re ready to start testing push notifications from Campaign. -