Gimbal + Airship - Testing & Integration Best Practices

The purpose of this document is to outline best practices when testing and implementing Gimbal with Airship. Below are important steps to consider for optimal implementation and results in testing environments. It is important to note, from a testing standpoint, that testing environments differ from real-world scenarios.

 

To learn the specifics of the integration, please follow the documentation for Airship and Gimbal. Below are links to documentation for both Airship and Gimbal Integration Guides for iOS and Android.

Once each SDK is successfully integrated into your application, you will be able to test the Gimbal location functionality by generating ‘Place’ events with beacons and geofences. Likewise, you will be able to independently test Airship's push messaging at this point. To learn how to generate a ‘Place’ event with beacons and geofences through Gimbal, click here.

In order to tie the two SDKs together to generate 1:1 location-based messaging, there is an additional integration point to allow the SDKs to communicate with each other. This Airship/Gimbal connector is a very lightweight integration and is documented here.

 

The specific Github repositories for iOS and Android, included in this documentation are:

Gimbal provides the capability to add Place Attributes, which are key/value pairs that can help you identify geographic or market segments in your messaging and analytics to make it easier to message to large groups of ‘places.’ These Place Attributes may be passed into Airship for use with Tags as described in this guide. 

 

Once the integration is complete, reference the Gimbal Testing Best-Practices guide to understand the best methodologies for testing on the location component of your app. For full end-to-end testing, including the ability to send a location-triggered message through Urban Airship, first, you’ll need to connect your Airship account to your Gimbal Manager account.

 

Login to https://go.urbanairship.com/ using your Airship credentials and follow the Gimbal Setup portion of the documentation, located here. This will guide you through the appropriate steps to connect your Airship and Gimbal Manager accounts and begin pulling your Gimbal Places into the Airship dashboard.