Tutorial: Subscribe, Report and Notify

As of FME Server 2019+, this functionality can be completed using FME Server Automations. For more information, please see Tutorial: Getting Started with Automations. Note that this tutorial series will no longer be updated, if you encounter an error, please contact Safe Support.

Introduction

To send a notification you need the device id/email addresses of the user you are trying to notify. You can set these directly in a subscription, but that should only be done for testing purposes or where there is a small static number of devices/users.

If you are going to be subscribing many devices/users to receive notifications, then you will need to use a database to track the subscriptions. This tutorial goes through all of the steps required to setup a database-backed subscriptions, reporting and notifications with Spatial Business Rules (e.g. geofence).

To make it easier to follow, this tutorial is separated into four sections:

• 0. Basics of Sending Notifications
• 1. Database-Backed Subscriptions
• 2. Spatial Business Rules
• 3. Subscribing and Unsubscribing

The workspaces and data used in the tutorial are available for download from GitHub.
Worth noting: Text/SMS messages can also be sent via third-party services like Twillio, Zapier and Amazon SNS. In the first two cases FME Server triggers the notifications via HTTP Post (HTTPUploader transformer or Push Subscriber) and in the later via the native SNS protocol (SNSSender transformer or SNS Subscriber).