Push Notifications

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jordansparks
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Push Notifications

Post by jordansparks » Wed Jun 16, 2021 8:21 pm

The current API doesn't do push notifications. If you currently want to know about new or changed appointments, you would instead use Appointments GET (multiple), passing a DateTStamp of 5 minutes ago to get any appointments changed or added in the last five minutes. You could also instead use Signalods GET, passing in a SigDateTime of 5 minutes ago to see if a particular date had any appointment changes on it. You could send requests faster, maybe every 30 seconds. But no matter how fast you send requests, it's still not as elegant as getting a push notification. So, we're going to tackle that soon. Each developer who wants push notifications will probably need to set up a web service to receive them. You would manage your subscriptions using new methods in our current API. I can imagine messages going out that would be as fine grained as getting notified when any user at the dental office selected a new patient or performed any other action of interest. The message could include information about which workstation this happened on.
Jordan Sparks, DMD
http://www.opendental.com

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jordansparks
Site Admin
Posts: 5739
Joined: Sun Jun 17, 2007 3:59 pm
Location: Salem, Oregon
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Re: Push Notifications

Post by jordansparks » Thu Jun 17, 2021 6:39 am

After sleeping on it, my idea for push notifications seems like too much of a burden for many. I suppose we could do the same thing through a polling strategy, first. Same sorts of events, but you would send a request to our API every few minutes to get your latest events. Push notifications could be an optional improvement that stacks on top of that later.
Jordan Sparks, DMD
http://www.opendental.com

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