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Azure notification hub client can send up to 20 tags at a time with the SendTemplateNotificationAsync() function. If I have 200,000 customers and both the messages and recipients of each message are constantly changing, the ideal would be to have a tag for each customer, but with the 10 tag send limit this isn’t possible.

How do I manage and send to hundreds of thousands of customers without doing thousands of calls to hub client functions every push message?

Nikita R.
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Questioner
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1 Answers1

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Tagging is great for user-opt-in messaging and/or single message to a user type messaging. However, it isn't the right solution when you want to segment your users randomly and send to a dynamic list of users. At that point, you will want to use Direct Send (where you are doing thousands of calls to the hub), doing the segmentation yourself probably via a database, or you would use a service such as Azure Mobile Engagement.

Adrian Hall
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    Hi, I am with the Notification Hubs team and we refer this to the inbox scenarios (similar to emails). Notification Hubs actually supports up to 60 tags per device, but given your case of generally sending to 1 or few devices, Direct Send would be recommended. Essentially, you can store all device tokens, and feed those tokens for speedy process and sends through NH. You can batch up to 1000 tokens per send. See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/mt734910.aspx for more details. – Mimi Xu Jan 25 '17 at 17:38
  • @mimi-xu thanks for the workaround, but I'm having this same issue, and I've found two other questions of people trying to do this [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27098667/azure-notification-hub-tag-limits/27117688), [here](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44431084/azure-notification-hub-best-practice-in-social-network-scenario) and also on the Azure feedback forums [here](https://feedback.azure.com/forums/218849-notification-hubs/suggestions/12880704-increase-tag-limit-expression). Are there any plans to implement this natively in NH to make this easier (the whole point of NH)? – chillNZ Aug 19 '18 at 22:15
  • Also by handling registrations myself I lose the ability to use tags for other means and broadcast to all devices (there is another arbitrary cap on the Direct Batch Send of 1000 devices and this won't cover everyone, so I need to send in batches myself).Do I need to handle registrations myself but also register with Azure NH to be able to choose between the options? – chillNZ Aug 19 '18 at 22:38