Unlimited Geofences and Location Monitoring for Ionic Apps

So, you guys probably know that natively, Android limits geofences to 100 locations while iOS limits it to a mere 20. This can be a struggle when you want to monitor hundreds of geofences. I know there are ways to remove old geofences and recreate another 100/20 based on the user’s latest geofence but that can be draining on the phone’s resources, thus draining on the battery.

This is where Radar.io comes in. With the free plan, you are able to have up to 1,000 geofences and unlimited with their paid plans.

You can see an example of Radar being used in my application, Clipit.

In order to use Radar’s native functionality for Android and iOS in Ionic application, I created a Cordova plugin. This makes it that much easier to monitor user location.

The plugin can be downloaded from my Github:

Simranjitk/radar-ionic

Install the plugin

ionic cordova plugin add ionic-radar

Usage

• Setting up Radar Keys

For Android, under src -> android -> com -> Radar in Radar.java, add your Radar Key in the initialize method

public void initialize(CordovaInterface cordova, CordovaWebView webView) {
    super.initialize(cordova, webView);
    Context context =    
        this.cordova.getActivity().getApplicationContext();
    Radar.initialize(context, "your_radar_key");
    Log.d(TAG, "Initializing Radar Plugin");
}

For iOS, under ios in RadarWrapper.swift, add your Radar Key in the pluginInitialize function

override func pluginInitialize() {
    Radar.initialize(publishableKey: "your_radar_key");
}

• Declaring Cordova

On whichever page you want to use the Radar plugin, you can declare cordova just below your exports, as follows:

declare var cordova: any;

• Start Tracking

When you want to begin tracking the user’s location in the background, simply call the start tracking method:

cordova.plugins.RadarPlugin.startTracking(value => {
});

• Stop Tracking

To stop background location tracking, run:

cordova.plugins.RadarPlugin.stopTracking(value => {
});

• Set User ID

If you want to give users a customized user ID rather than the one generated by Radar, you can do it by running the following:

cordova.plugins.RadarPlugin.stopTracking(userID, value => {
});

• Check Permission

Check if the app has location permission:

cordova.plugins.RadarPlugin.checkPermissions();

• Get Permission

Ask the user for location permission:

cordova.plugins.RadarPlugin.getPermissions();

I haven’t yet integrated all of the methods from the native Radar SDK and will get around to doing it sometime! Feel free to contribute to the plugin on Github.

If you guys have any question about the plugin and how it works, feel free to leave a comment here, post an issue on Github, or email me at clipitapplication@gmail.com and I will gladly help.