This topic describes best practices for using periodic notifications and lists any requirements your app needs to meet to be accepted in the Windows Store.
Guidelines
- Call the StartPeriodicUpdate or StartPeriodicUpdateBatch method each time your app is launched or brought into focus. This ensures that the tile content will be updated each time the user launches or switches to the app.
- Follow the user experience guidelines for tiles and badges when you consider what to place on the tile and how frequently the tile should be updated.
- Periodic tile updates support the tile notification tag used with the notification queue. When using TileUpdater.startPeriodicUpdateBatch, your service can set the tag on each notification by providing the X-WNS-Tag HTTP response header. For more information on using tags and the notification queue, see How to use the notification queue with local notifications. For more information on using the X-WNS-Tag HTTP response header with periodic notifications, see TileUpdater.startPeriodicUpdateBatch.
- Update your tile and badge XML content on your web service to match the polling frequency of your client. For instance, if the tile is set to poll at half-hour intervals, it is a best practice to also update the content on your web service every half an hour.
- Set the expiration on your tile or badge update to match the time period after which your notification would no longer be useful to the user. By default, all polled tile and badge content expires three days after they are received by the client, but should your cloud service become unreachable or the user disconnects from the network for an extended period of time, the content on your tile should not persist on the Start screen when it is no longer relevant. For example, a shopping deal that expires at midnight should set its expiration time to midnight. For more information on setting the expiration time, see the Periodic notification overview.
- Do not use periodic updates for content that the user will expect to receive immediately, such as breaking news or weather alerts. Notifications of that type are best delivered through push notifications.
- Use the startTime parameter in StartPeriodicUpdate or StartPeriodicUpdateBatch to cause the update to occur at a specific time of day. The startTime specifies the time of only the first poll, with subsequent polling being timed from that occurrence. Setting the startTime to 2:00 PM with a recurrance interval of 24 hours would ensure that updates will always happen at or soon after 2:00 each day.
Troubleshooting
Periodic notifications do not update the tile or badge
You might be encountering one or more of several issues that could prevent your periodic notifications from appearing:
- The web service is not returning a valid XML document that conforms to the tile XML schema. If you experience problems while implementing periodic notifications, first check that your tile's XML is formatted correctly. When debugging a problem with periodic notifications, as a first step, we recommended that you test your XML through a local notification. For more information, see Quickstart: Sending a tile update and Guidelines and checklist for tiles.
- The text returned from the poll request is not formatted as UTF-8. The UTF-8 encoding is required.
- Your service is not correctly responding to the HTTP GET request used by Windows when it polls the provided URL for your service. Both the HTTP and HTTPS protocols are supported.
- Your app did not declare Internet capability in its app manifest file (package.appxmanifest). In the Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8 manifest editor, you will find this option under the Capabilities tab as Internet (Client). If this capability is not declared for the app, Windows will not poll your service.
- Ensure that the values set by the X-WNS-Tag and X-WNS-Expires headers are formatted properly.
Periodic updates are delayed
- Windows can delay the polling of your URL by up to 15 minutes if necessary to optimize power and performance.
- Your service was not available at the time your URL was contacted. When the service is not available, it will not be contacted again until the next polling interval.
Checklist
For general Windows Store requirements, see Certification requirements for Windows apps.
Related topics
Build date: 11/29/2012
