FileMaker Cross Platform Notifications

Creating a Pushover Account

To begin we will need a free account with Pushover.net. All pricing involved with Pushover.net is through the purchase of their apps for a users device. Each app costs 5 dollars, and then you are able to send up to 7,500 notifications a month without any additional cost. After you have created an account you need to navigate to the Pushover Apps & Plugins page and create a new application. Once you have created a new application copy and paste the application API Key into the demo file.

Retrieving a Users Pushover ID

We can easily download a user's Pushover ID into FileMaker by making a simple post call using Insert from URL. The url you will be posting to is api.pushover.net/1/users/login.xml and the api requires 2 parameters, email and password. Below is an example of the full URL request.

insert from url "httpspost://api.pushover.net/1/users/login.xml?email=" & $email & "&password=" & $password

Managing Groups

One great feature of Pushover you can take advantage of is groups. Groups allow you to manage your users and then send out a notification to that segment of users all at once. You can create a new group from the Pushover Groups page. Once you have created your group you can use the generated group key to add and remove users, and disable/enable a user in the group all from within FileMaker using a simple rest api. Another useful feature of groups in Pushover is the subscription feature that allows for anonymous users to sign up to receive notifications and be automatically added to a group.

Sending Messages

Sending a message is very similar to all the other api calls not surprisingly. The api endpoint for sending a message is api.pushover.net/1/messages.xml or api.pushover.net/1/messages.json. And there are quite a few parameters you can include to customize your message. Below is a list of all the available parameters.

Required Parameters

• token - Pushover application token/id
• user - Can be userID or groupID
• message - Must be URL encoded
• retry - required if priority is 2. Time in seconds to wait between retries until acknowledged. Min of 30
• expire - Required if priority is 2. Time in seconds to keep retrying until acknowledged. Max of 86400 seconds or 1 day

Optional Parameters

• device - Device name, if left empty all of a user’s devices will be notified
• title
• html - if set to 1, will allow for html tags in the message which will allow the use of the following tags; bold, italic, underline, font-color, and html links
• timestamp - a unix timestamp in CST time zone ex: 1331249662
• priority - The priority of the message ranging from -2 to 2. The default “Normal” priority of 0 will be set if left empty
• url
• url_title
• sound - if left empty, the users default will be used, if no default then “pushover” will be used

Full API Reference

Conclusion

With a few api calls you can easily extend FileMaker with the ability to communicate with a mobile work force on virtually any device including iOS Devices, Android Devices, and Web/Desktops. Through the use of messaging groups you can also easily manage who should receive what alerts and when. Pushover's advanced features give you a lot more control than something like text messaging and allows you to brand your notifications, change the messages sound, set the message priority, and manage whether a user is enabled or disabled in a group.