I'm building an iOS App, in which I would wish to handle more than 20 iBeacons. Basically all beacons added to the web portal have to be handled by the App. Since there is an iOS restriction to number of region to be monitored as 20, I'm unable to give different local notifications for beacons in same region (having same UUID).
Is there any way to handle this?
A few points:
The 20 region limit applies to the number of CLRegion objects that can be registered by a single app. It does not mean you can only detect 20 beacons. Since each CLRegion object can leave the major and/or minor nil (making the fields a wildcard), each one can match billions of beacons.
Beacon apps typically use local notifications, not push notifications.
The way you set up many different notifications to come from many different beacons is like this:
Define a single wildcard region that matches all of your beacons. (Or a few regions if needed for background triggering).
Start monitoring and ranging for each of these regions.
In the didRangeBeacond:inRegion callback keep a flag for each individual beacon to see if you have sent a notification for it before. If not, set the flag to true and trigger a local notification specific to that beacon's identifiers.
Related
I want to build that gets notified (even when in the background) when it gets in range of any iBeacon with a given UUID.
I know I could monitor an individual region for each of my beacons, but if I understand correctly, on iOS, I am limited to 20 monitored regions.
So the other alternative is to monitor a region based solely on its UUID, but then when do I get enter/exit notifications for that region? Whenever I get in range or out of range of any beacon with the same UUID, or only when I get in range of the first one and out of range of the last one?
If you monitor based on a wildcard region that includes only a ProximityUUID (leaving major and minor nil) then :
You will only get one didEnter callback the first time the first beacon is detected. If a second, third, or additional beacon is detected matching this wildcard region, then you did not get any monitoring callbacks.
You won't get any further callbacks until all beacons matching the wildcard region disappear (this takes at least 30 seconds in the foreground, longer in the background.) At that time, you'll get a call to didExit. After receiving a didExit, you will again be eligible for the callback in (1) above.
If you want more granular callbacks about individual beacons there are a few choices:
Use additional region definitions (up to the 20 allowed) and monitor them all.
Dynamically change the regions you are monitoring when you get a didEnter. This might work if you have a limited number of beacons (e.g. less than 20) matching a particular wildcard region. You could then activate monitoring for each of these sub-regions.
Use ranging APIs. These give you callbacks once per second with a list of all matching beacons seen that match a region. The trick is that this is generally limited to 10 seconds after region transition in the background. But it is possible to extend it to 180 seconds on request, or indefinitely if you declare your app to be a background location app in Info.plist. (If you go this route, there are a few tricks to get this working properly.)
I am trying to build a test app that would detect a given set of iBeacon deployed in a few physical locations. The detection should be done in the background, and make a call to a server following a certain logic.
Apple's rule of thumb is using the same UUID for all of my physical locations:
The UUID is shared by all locations.
This allows an iOS device to use a single identifier to recognize any of the stores with a single region.
Each specific store, San Francisco, Paris, and London, is then assigned a unique major value, allowing a device to identify which specific store
it is in.
I found the call for setting a region with a given UUID, but did not find what object is returned when the UUID is detected, and what fields are returned.
Where does the app get the major/minor value when iOS detects a beacon with a given UUID?
When using monitoring APIs, you only get a CLBeaconRegion object in the enter/exit callback from CoreLocation. A beacon region defined by this class typically doesn't represent individual beacons, but a range of beacons based on wildcard identifiers.
Because of this, if you use wildcards in your region definition (as is typical) you actually can't see which specific beacon triggered a region entry. To solve this problem, you must combine both monitoring and ranging APIs at the same time. If you monitor and range simultaneously, CoreLocation will give you a callback in the didRangeBeacons beacons: [CLBeacon] inRegion region: CLBeaconRegion method with an array of all the CLBeacon objects it saw.
Because the callback with the array of beacons arrives once per second, however, you will need to add custom logic to do something only once when beacon first appears, if necessary.
Since you want background detection, it is important that you do both ranging and monitoring simultaneously. Even if you don't put anything in your monitoring callback because of the lack of specific beacon information, you need to do monitoring just to get your app woken up in the background on a new beacon detection. Then, you will get ranging callbacks for approximately 10 seconds before your app is suspended again.
I am developing an iOS 8 app with multiple Estimote iBeacons. According to (https://community.estimote.com/hc/communities/public/questions/200966066-How-detect-multiple-beacons-iOS?locale=en-us), I implemented one BeaconManager, and registered it with two BeaconRegions. However, only the second beacon region works.
Instead, I used two BeaconManagers and register one BeaconRegion for each of them. Now it works. However, a new problem occurs: in some cases when I enter or exit the region, I receive multiple notifications for one beacon, instead of only one. This link (http://beekn.net/2013/11/ibeacon-tutorial-dealing-with-errors/) says it's a bug from Apple, but I am not sure about the case.
Anyone can help?
Thanks,
Ryan
Beacon regions are shared system resources, which means that all the BeaconManagers and LocationManagers are notified about state changes of all the regions registered in the app.
Example: if you monitor beacon region A with manager A, and beacon region B with manager B, manager A will still get notifications about region B. Same for manager B and region A.
Because of that, it rarely makes sense to have more than one instance of a BeaconManager in your app.
Monitoring multiple regions should work just fine with a single BeaconManager, there must be something specific to your code that leads to one of the regions not working. If you could add a code snippet to your question, that'd probably help tracking the issue down.
As per my opinion, these should be only one beacon manager to manage all beacon.
And if you have beacon from same vendor (In your case it is Estimote iBeacons) then I don't think that you need to create more than one region here.
Because all beacons of same vendors have same proximity UUID. What is different is its Major value and Minor value.
So you can differentiate all beacons with its Major and Minor values also there is a ranging which can make a further granularity for seperation.
I've been searching around to find a straight answer to a problem I'm facing and the information is a little scattered. I'm not sure whether it's possible or not based on the answers.
Basically I'm using iBeacons as a component to my app. The scenario is this, you have a high street with numerous shops. Each shop has 1 beacon in their window facing to the street. A generic shopping app is on the user's phone.
When a user walks up the high street I want a user to receive a notification when passing a shop. This notification would say something like "Check out MyShops latest offers and discounts" with a prompt to open the app. This is all as the app is in the background.
All the beacons have a consistent UDID which tie to my app. And each shop would have it's own major identifier.
I want the notification to be specific to a shop (with a specific beacon major and minor) but I cannot find a way of determining which beacon was entered while in the background.
Also some shops may be close and have broadcast overlap, will the background process for entering a region trigger for each beacon you get in range of if they have the same UDID?
You can do what you want with a common app that launches the other store-specific apps once it is brought to the foreground by a user tapping the local notification.
A few points:
You must combine CoreLocation monitoring and ranging APIs to do this. Monitoring will wake up the app into the background on beacon detection (but only for 10 secs) and ranging will give you updates every second with an NSArray containing all visible beacons with the full beacon identifiers and a distance estimate for each.
In the ranging callback, you can compare the estimated distance to all visible beacons to determine which is closest (CLBeacon.accuracy). The closest one is what should send the local notification for the shop.
Do not confuse the beacon ProximityUUID with the iOS device's unique UDID. The two have nothing to do with one another.
From what I have understood, minor and major ids in beacons are used for segmentation (for instance, major for physical stores and minor for different locations within a given store).
Then, as a beacon does not deliver rich payload, I guess those ids will be exploited to deserve the adequate information to the user - and probably through webservices.
Finally, UUID are said to be for the whole fleet. From what I understand, an app (e.g for retail store) is likely to register for only one or a few UUID (generally one, more for complex architectures or overload of services).
At the application level, you can (1) range for beacons when the app is foreground (with catching capabilities for minor/major ids), and (2) detect region exit/entry (monitoringForRegion:) while in background + deliver UILocalNotification to wake up the app (going back to (1)).
Now lets deal with the end user. I think we can assume that the average one will not go through a whole retail store with the app in foreground in his hand, and is more likely to have it running in background.
Consequently, case (2) will be the most common one.
But as all emitters will share the same UUID and as the geolocation manager running in background is monitoring for region linked to UUID, didEnter and didExit regions delegate methods risk no to be triggered intelligently depending on the range/configuration of emitters. Finally, not all the indoor location-based advertising you wanted to broadcast to your customers will be received and catched.
In fact, I fear that only the one when the customer will arrive at the store location will be systematically suggested (in a background mode context).
Am I missing something?
You are mostly right. The one thing you are missing is that you can monitor on 20 different regions simultaneously, and these regions can optionally include the major and/or the minor. So you could trigger many times in a (big) store by intelligently designing your iBeacon identifiers and region monitors.
Two caveats: in-region monitoring callbacks fire when the beacon first comes into range (about 50m). They are also not simultaneous. They can take up to 15 min on an iPhone 4S with the app in the background, although it is faster on an iPhone 5.
To phrase what David said a little differently:
You can define a beacon region using a UUID, a UUID and a major value, or a UUID + a major and a minor value.
If you define a region using just the UUID, any beacon with that UUID will trigger a didEnterRegion message, and the OS will treat all beacons with that UUID as part of the same region.
However, if you create a region with UUID+Major, or UUID+Major+Minor, only beacons matching those values will trigger a region notification. You can have 2 beacons with the same UUID and major value right next to each other and different minor values. If you've registered 2 different regions with specific UUID+Major+Minor value, you'll get independent enter/exit/ranging messages about each region. A third beacon with the same UUID and major value but a different minor value will not trigger enter/exit notifications.