Events: Notify User

Notifying users about incidents or critical processes at the right time is at the core of an optimally functioning operation. Ubidots simplifies this process with the Notify User event action, allowing you to select users or contacts from your account and notify them via SMS, email or voice call.

Learn how to create a Notify User action following this guide.

To add contact information to your users, follow these steps:

Notes:

You can also create "contacts" using the Address Book module. Contacts created this way are different from regular users since they don't have login credentials nor necessarily have any type of interaction with the platform; they're just used to notify relevant parties of any operational event. Learn how to create contacts here.

To begin, head to the “data” tab →"Events" and hover over the “+” button, located at the upper right corner of the screen, and create a conditional event, global event, or scheduled event depending on your needs.

Next, configure the event’s triggers with an AND/OR logic. For additional details on how to configure these triggers, head to their corresponding guides: value based, inactivity, geofence.

With the "trigger" logic configured, it’s now time to set up the Notify User action.

1. Click on the “+ add action” button. From the available options, select “Notify User”.

2. Choose whether the recipients will be selected one by one via a user/contact list or with a commonly shared tag (users that share a tag with the event action will be notified).

3. Either choose the users or contacts to be notified using the respective option. If you chose to use tags, type them in the desginated field. You can enter:

Dynamic bookmarks are resolved using the device that fired the event. If multiple static and dynamic sources are provided, Ubidots merges the resulting tags before sending the notification.

The contact information configured in each user’s settings (section 1) will be used for delivery.

4. Choose one or multiple contact methods out of these options:

5. Customize the “active trigger” and the “back to normal” (optional) texts to be delivered to the receiving user(s). If “email” was one of the chosen contact methods, you can also change the subject of the message.

By using the tag icon at the upper right corners of the “subject” and “message” fields you can easily add information such as device ID, timestamp, variable name, etc.

6. Optionally, enable the “repeat action” if you want to repeat the action multiple times while the event is triggered. You can choose how often and up to how many times the action will be repeated. There’s a limit of 50 action repetitions.

7. Click on “save” once you finish configuring the action and on “next”, unless you want to set up multiple actions.

8. After completing the action configuration you’ll proceed to the final step, the “settings” tab. There, you’ll name the event and give it a description (optional).

9. Another optional step is to use a tag on the event. This is a great tool to control what your end users see in your app. In this case, for instance, you could decide that your end user sees one event, but not another, using tags. Learn more about tags here.

10. Finally (unless the event you created is a scheduled event), determine the activity window in which the events should be executed. An event can have multiple active windows by clicking on the “+ add window button” and configuring them correspondingly. After finishing this, click on “save” and your event will be deployed.