node-pushnotifications: APN errors not retrieved properly + doc update?

I had a hard time understanding why my iOS push notifications suddenly did not work, and went through multiple issues:

The topic property is now REQUIRED since node-apn changed the way to connect to APNs (thanks for the semver breaking BTW…)
To find the previous issue, I had to dig in the node-apn code to reveal the error, as node-pushnotifications did not show the error and only shows a successful promise with a failure count and no error message, even though the error message is return from node-apn. It seems that node-apn may have changed the way it returns errors, and the result is that we cannot see the underlying error when a notification sending fails.

It would be nice to fix the doc regarding the topic property and to investigate why error messages are not reported correctly.

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 7 years ago
Reactions: 3
Comments: 18 (2 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

I also just lost quiet some time due to this issue - i temporarily added a console log in the apn module so i could debug better.

flipace on Jun 1, 2017

Hello @sinedied, @appfeel, @miqmago regarding the topic parameter I created a PR for the README update (https://github.com/appfeel/node-pushnotifications/pull/68) as a follow-up to https://github.com/appfeel/node-pushnotifications/issues/67

alex-friedl on Nov 14, 2017

Hmm… that’s a little bit messing. Regarding to documentate it in readme.md it’s easy.

Regarding to catch the error, the main purpose of the library was to standarize the response:

            (response.failed || []).forEach((failure) => {
                resumed.failure += 1;
                if (failure.error) {
                    // A transport-level error occurred (e.g. network problem)
                    resumed.message.push({
                        regId: failure.device,
                        error: failure.error,
                    });
                } else {
                    // `failure.status` is the HTTP status code
                    // `failure.response` is the JSON payload
                    resumed.message.push({
                        regId: failure.device,
                        error: new Error(failure.response.reason || failure.response),
                    });
                }
            });

So when there is an error in node-apn the error is directly streamed to the resumed.messages. If there is no failure.error info then a new error is generated with the failure.response info (comming from Apple).

I can’t find where the MissingTopic error is raised. Could you point me to the line in node-apn where this error is generated? Maybe in this way I could try to figure out how to stream the error…

Also would be nice to have the failure object (if you could place a console.log of it) when this error is produced, in order to understand what is comming from node-apn. If the error is not comming, node-pushnotifications is not able to catch it and so it cannot be emmited…

appfeel on Feb 24, 2017