Notification messages vs data messages in Firebase - Hands-On Comparison

Notification messages vs data messages

📖 Scenario: You are building a mobile app that needs to send messages to users. Some messages should show a notification automatically, while others should send data silently for the app to handle.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to create Firebase Cloud Messaging payloads for notification messages and data messages, and understand their differences.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a notification message payload with title and body

Create a data message payload with custom key-value pairs

Add a condition to select message type

Complete the final payload structure for sending

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Mobile apps use Firebase Cloud Messaging to notify users or send data updates silently.

💼 Career

Understanding message payloads is essential for backend developers and cloud engineers working with push notifications.

1

Create a notification message payload

Create a dictionary called notification_message with keys title set to "Hello User" and body set to "You have a new alert".

Firebase

# Create notification_message dictionary with title and body
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary with keys 'title' and 'body' for the notification message.

2

Create a data message payload

Create a dictionary called data_message with keys action set to "update" and item_id set to "12345".

Firebase

notification_message = {
    "title": "Hello User",
    "body": "You have a new alert"
}
# Create data_message dictionary with action and item_id
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary with keys 'action' and 'item_id' for the data message.

3

Add a message type selector

Create a variable called use_notification and set it to True. Then create a variable called message_payload that is notification_message if use_notification is True, otherwise data_message.

Firebase

notification_message = {
    "title": "Hello User",
    "body": "You have a new alert"
}
data_message = {
    "action": "update",
    "item_id": "12345"
}
# Create use_notification variable and message_payload selection
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a boolean variable and a conditional expression to select the payload.

4

Complete the final Firebase message payload

Create a dictionary called firebase_message with a key message whose value is a dictionary containing token set to "user_device_token" and either notification set to message_payload if use_notification is True, or data set to message_payload if use_notification is False.

Firebase

notification_message = {
    "title": "Hello User",
    "body": "You have a new alert"
}
data_message = {
    "action": "update",
    "item_id": "12345"
}
use_notification = True
message_payload = notification_message if use_notification else data_message
# Create firebase_message dictionary with message key and token, notification or data
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use dictionary unpacking or conditional keys to add notification or data inside the message.