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Paul Winterhalder

The work on this is running in our development environment. The Builder API support is in place - and we're currently looking at the possibility of adding it as a new tab in the Deployment screen of the Portal.

Paul.

Paul Winterhalder

Hi,

Apologies for the slow response.

We don't have any calls that could directly handle a "file" of profileIds. We do have a few "toBatch" calls that are callable from S2S though - so you could probably have an offboard system make those calls - and call braincloud to send the notifications in batches.

Where are these profileIds coming from? An offboard analytics system of some sort?

To answer your questions:

We are planning a revamp of our notifications system and it's APIs. I'll add this conversation so that it will be considered as we're planning that.
As mentioned above, using one of the "Batch" calls would make the most sense - and keep your API counts reasonable
There's an API call to call the SendRichPushNotificationWithParams, plus a second api call for the sending the push notification itself. So that would be <numReceivers> x 2 for API costs. Less if called from within a script. But the *Batch() calls would be
Substitutions and custom metadata/custom data - the current APIs don't - so you'd probably need to handle those client side. Are the substitutions highly personal - like player's name?

I hope that helps to clarify things,

Paul.

Paul Winterhalder

Hi @moondory77 ,

We hear you - and are looking to see what options we can provide.

The thing to understand is that there are a lot of dependencies between metadata in the brainCloud system - and our deployment mechanisms work hard to ensure the integrity of the data that gets pushed. Even more importantly - it works to prevent user data from being corrupted by a mis-match of data during deployments - which is why apps are very temporarily disabled during a deployment.

These deployments normally take well under a minute and aren't much more troublesome than a common wifi interruption for clients [depends upon the client implementation though]... (note - the deployment may seem like it takes longer on the web - as there is a lot of data dependency checking to do - but all of that is done BEFORE we disable the app... which happens just for the actually data migration activity itself).

If you contact us via the support chat with your appId and the time you last did a deployment - we can take a look to see if your deployment times are above normal.

Also - we are working to provide a separate custom entity deployment mechanism - similar to what has been done for item management.

Paul.

Paul Winterhalder

Unfortunately, our notification templating system is very simple and currently only supports simple text notifications. It does not currently push a template id.

We do have plans to revamp the system on our "to-do" list - but it has not been scheduled yet.

We recommend folks use the "raw" template calls - they give devs the most control over what gets sent to the various notification systems.

Paul.

Paul Winterhalder

To answer your questions:

Yes - it's essentially the same - though I think the specific code paths vary.
We do not currently have an selective migration for custom entities via the builder api - but I'll raise that with the devs. I would think that would be very doable.
Not currently

I'll get the devs looking into #2.

Paul.

Paul Winterhalder

Hi,

API calls triggered by the backend DO count towards API usage -- so using the API Explorer to make calls do get counted as API calls. So - if you use API explorer to trigger a user batch job that then runs scripts on all of your users - yes, yes that does get counted as API calls.

Also - uploads of files to and from the portal do get counted in the file transfer costs.

Other normal portal operations - like viewing users, viewing logs, editing scripts, etc - do NOT get charged in API counts. So to clarify - using the API explorer to view a leaderboard is going to add an API count - but using the leaderboard viewer at App > Global > Leaderboards > Leaderboards does not!

To be honest - in general - usaging of the portal is negligible. You won't really notice the usage added by what you're doing in the API explorer or working through the portal. It's only if you use the API Explorer to kick off a large job that API counts would be noticable <-- as you'd expect!

I hope that helps!

Paul.

Paul Winterhalder

Hmm - we'll look into it. Definitely looks like it isn't hooked up to the S2S proxy properly.

Thanks for reporting this.

Paul Winterhalder

Hi @moondory77 ,

Yes, you observed correctly.

During the data migration portion of the deployment (which occurs after the system has done a bunch of validation and consistency checks), the system temporarily disables your app to do the actual data migration.

This is to protect the data integrity of your app - as your app's metadata, reference data and cloud code scripts are all changing underneath it. So we disable the app, make the changes, and re-enable the app.

All of this normally takes just a few seconds - though it does depend upon the number of changes being made.

I hope that helps to clarify things!

Paul.

Paul Winterhalder

Hi @noah,

I agree that this would be a good feature.

I've been doing some thinking on it...

What if we could restrict an S2S server to only being able to call a specific set of scripts? That way you would be in full control as to the scope of the API that you are making available.

Would that work for your use case?

Paul.

Paul Winterhalder

Hi folks,

brainCloud 6 with brainBot is now live!
(https://updates.braincloudservers.com/braincloud-6.0-with-brainbot-is-here-1x54Sk)

Thoughts on brainBot - or the new features in general?

We're eager to hear what you think!

Paul.

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