Phonegap Android Plugin

Phonegap SOAP Background Service Plugin

Requirements

Introduction
I have developed an application for my client using the Phonegap framework for cross platform development. This application has currently only been created for Android handsets. The purpose of the application is to allow a user to search for their next refuse collection and to give information about the clients waste collection services.

The user can search for their location using either the phone’s built in GPS service or using a UK Postcode lookup. Once the longitude and latitude of the user has been determined, a call is made to the clients SOAP based webservice which provides details of the users next two collections.

The client now wishes to provide a ‘push’ notification to the user if the delivery schedule changes. This feature will have to run as a background service and will poll the SOAP webservice periodically to check for updates. If a change to the schedule has been indicated by the webservice, the client should be notified and informed of the change to the schedule.

Feature Requirements
The new service must be created as a Phonegap plugin as detailed in the phonegap documentation. http://wiki.phonegap.com/w/page/36752779/PhoneGap%20Plugins This will give me a javaScript interface to interact with the service. This is essential to provide the following features.

Allow the current application to switch the notification service on and off
Allow the application to be distributed as a single installation


Technical Requirements
The plugin must be designed to work with Phonegap 1.2 and Android 2.2+
The background service will be triggered using a javaScript call from within the application, this call will pass the users location as latitude and longitude and the polling interval in seconds. For example:

startBackgroundNotification(52.6645,-1.0732,6000);

This call should replace any currently running schedules. You should also be able to cancel the background service by sending a call like:

stopBackGroundNotification();

The background service should then poll the SOAP based webservice according to the specified schedule.

If the background service is shutdown by the phone rebooting or if the task is ended by a task killing application, it should restart in the background.

If the SOAP service response indicates that an update has been made to the schedule then the plugin should create a notification in the statusbar of the phone. This notification will display a bin icon and a message to say that there has been a change to your collection schedule. If the user clicks on the notification the main Phonegap application will open. This application will then download the latest collection schedule an display it to the user.

The SOAP webservice will return the same notification event until it is cleared by the clients server administrator. The background service should remember the last notification event so that it doesn’t generate duplicate notification events to the user.