Background notification with lots of beacons

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1

Hi

I am an iOS developer from S.Korea.
I am not sure if I understand everything alright, but I guess I encountered a problem.

Situation
1. I am trying to own lots of lots of beacon, that is probably more than 100,000 in the future, and I need to know how to handle all of them.

  1. at least 20 beacons should be allocated to one store/shop.

  2. trying to build an app to manage lots of different stores

What I understood on my own
1. every beacon should share one exact UUID, because ESTBeaconRegion needs it to be instantiated. Otherwise, the code should contains lots of different UUID static or I should query to estimate cloud every time.

  1. every beacon sharing one exact UUID can be separated, distinguished, and managed with major * minor value.

Problem
1. I want my app to be notified in background while people pass lots of beacon by.

  1. My understanding is to use "startMonitoringForRegion" method in ESTBeaconManager for background behavior, but the method has call back methods, "didEnterRegion", and "didExitRegion" which have no beacon reference as an parameter. In this case, there will be no way to detect each beacon's major and minor value to distinguish each store.

Question
- Is there a way to get beacon's major and minor value in iOS background to get notification?

2

Hi Park,

I'd approach the problem this way:

  • region monitoring triggers "did enter region"
  • at this point iOS gives your app about 10 seconds to handle the callback
  • you can use these 10 seconds to start regular ranging
  • "did range beacons" gets called, and this one contains specific beacon data

You won't get exact information about which specific beacon triggered the enter, but the subsequent ranging should give you an idea of which beacons are in the vicinity, and you can then act accordingly.

A few things to keep in mind:

  • you can only monitor up to 20 regions at a time
  • once "did enter" fires for a specific region, the callback won't fire again until "did exit" happens