Generate int unique id as android notification id

Question

When I send multiple push notifications, I need them to be all shown in the notification bar ordered by the time sent desc. I know I should use unique notification - I tried

Answer 1

You are using the same notification ID (the value is always 1) for all your notifications. You probably should separate out the notification ID into a separate singleton class:

public class NotificationID {
    private final static AtomicInteger c = new AtomicInteger(0);
    public static int getID() {
        return c.incrementAndGet();
    }
}

Then use NotificationID.getID() instead of NOTIFICATION_ID in your code.

EDIT: As @racs points out in a comment, the above approach is not enough to ensure proper behavior if your app process happens to be killed. At a minimum, the initial value of the AtomicInteger should be initialized from some activity's saved state rather than starting at 0. If the notification IDs need to be unique across restarts of the app (again, where the app process may be killed off), then the latest value should be saved somewhere (probably to shared prefs) after every increment and restored when the app starts.

Answer 2

Maybe not the best, but definitely the simplest is to use current time.

int oneTimeID = (int) SystemClock.uptimeMillis();
mNotificationManager.notify(oneTimeID, mBuilder.build());

The good: this is the easiest way to get increasing ids.

The bad: time is a long and we're truncating it to half of that. This means that the counter will wrap around every 2'147'483'647 /1000(ms->s)/60(s->m)/60(m->h)/24(h->d) =~25 days.

SystemClock.uptimeMillis() has 2 advantages over currentTimeMillis:

1. discounts all the milliseconds spent at deep sleep, what decreases amount of wraparounds.
2. starts at 0 when the phone is restarted.

Answer 3

For anyone still looking around. I generated a timestamp and used it as the id.

import java.util.Date;
import java.util.Locale;

public int createID(){
   Date now = new Date();
   int id = Integer.parseInt(new SimpleDateFormat("ddHHmmss",  Locale.US).format(now));
   return id;
}

Use it like so

int id = createID();
mNotifyManager.notify(id, mBuilder.build());

Answer 4

private static final String PREFERENCE_LAST_NOTIF_ID = "PREFERENCE_LAST_NOTIF_ID";

private static int getNextNotifId(Context context) {
    SharedPreferences sharedPreferences = PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences(context);
    int id = sharedPreferences.getInt(PREFERENCE_LAST_NOTIF_ID, 0) + 1;
    if (id == Integer.MAX_VALUE) { id = 0; } // isn't this over kill ??? hahaha!!  ^_^
    sharedPreferences.edit().putInt(PREFERENCE_LAST_NOTIF_ID, id).apply();
    return id;
}

Answer 5

If someone reading this, there is a method here. it is better to specify a tag name also with id, so that it will help if you are bundling the part as a module to share with developers.

NOTE: The problem with assigning some random integer id is that, if any module or library uses the same id, your notification will be replaced by new notification data.

// here createID method means any generic method of creating an integer id
int id = createID();
// it will uniqly identify your module with uniq tag name & update if present.
mNotifyManager.notify("com.packagename.app", id, mBuilder.build());

Answer 6

You need to set either a unique tag (String) / id (integer)

Checkout this method in official documentaation

I suggest using any timestamp (SystemClock.uptimeMillis() / System.currentTimeMillis()) as a tag while notifying.

 notificationManager.notify(String.valueOf(System.currentTimeMillis()), 0, notification);