Android: Experience from just one project

If you want to add Push-Notifications to your app, you need to register your app for Google Cloud Messaging. You can do this here and get a configuration file.
That's the easy part. Just enter your app and package name and choose cloud messaging as service. Then download the config file and also remember the generated Sender ID and Server API Key to authenticate your app for the push service.

To use GCM with AndroidStudio, you also need to add the google-services plugin to gradle. Your projects build.gradle file need to add classpath 'com.google.gms:google-services:1.5.0-beta2' (currently there's already 2.0.0-beta6) under dependencies and your apps build.gradle file should look like this:

apply plugin: 'com.android.application'
apply plugin: 'com.google.gms.google-services'

Now, as the title says, the config file needs to be placed into the root folder. If there's no config-file, the GCM gradle plugin will throw an error complaining about the missing config file. In the current beta version, the plugin does not copy the config-files from your flavor-folders to the app-root which is really annoying. The issues #54 has quite some history and the current alpha version should fix the problem of copying the config file from build flavors, but I somehow couldn't get it working (and I'm also not so happy to use alpha versions in production environments)

I used some code found on stackoverfow to copy the config-file from the flavor to the app-root before the google-service plugin runs. build.gradle looks like this:

...
afterEvaluate {
  // add missing flavors if needed
  processStagingDebugGoogleServices.dependsOn switchToDebug
  processProductionReleaseGoogleServices.dependsOn switchToProduction
}
...

def appModuleRootFolder = '.'
def srcDir = 'src'
def googleServicesJson = 'google-services.json'

task switchToDebug(type: Copy) {
  def buildFlav = 'staging'
  from "${srcDir}/${buildFlav}"
  include "$googleServicesJson"
  into "$appModuleRootFolder"
}

task switchToProduction(type: Copy) {
  def buildFlav = 'production'
  from "${srcDir}/${buildFlav}/"
  include "$googleServicesJson"
  into "$appModuleRootFolder"
}

The good thing to mention is that google does not generate two separat files when using e.g. the .debug suffix for buildTypes. If you add your release package name when generating your configuration file and later on do the same process for the .debug package name, you get one google-services.json file with both entries. That way you have one config-file for all buildTypes for one flavor.

ContentResolver cr = context.getContentResolver();
ContentValues values = new ContentValues();

Uri calendarUri = null;
final String tZone = TimeZone.getDefault().getID();

values.put(CalendarContract.Events.DTSTART, appointmentItem.getStartTime().getTimeInMillis());
values.put(CalendarContract.Events.DTEND, appointmentItem.getEndTime().getTimeInMillis());
values.put(CalendarContract.Events.TITLE, appointmentItem.getTitle());
values.put(CalendarContract.Events.DESCRIPTION, appointmentItem.getTherapistsLabel());
values.put(CalendarContract.Events.EVENT_LOCATION, appointmentItem.getLocation());
values.put(CalendarContract.Events.CALENDAR_ID, calendarId);
values.put(CalendarContract.Events.EVENT_TIMEZONE, tZone);
values.put(CalendarContract.Events.EVENT_END_TIMEZONE, tZone);


calendarUri = cr.insert(CalendarContract.Events.CONTENT_URI, values);
...

final String tZone = TimeZone.getDefault().getID();

values.put(CalendarContract.Events.EVENT_TIMEZONE, tZone);
values.put(CalendarContract.Events.EVENT_END_TIMEZONE, tZone);