Request contains an invalid argument

[ppbittencourt1993]

Hi Jerome, how are you doing?

Some customers are presenting an issue when sending push notifications to their users's devices.
The response when trying to send the message to some of the targeted devices is "Request contains an invalid argument", that doesn't give much to work with. For others is a success, using the same payload.
The message data seems to be created correctly, since otherwise it would fail for every device.

Another thing is that when this happens, the next push notification sent targeting the same devices, now returns a "Requested entity not found error" for each time the previous error happen, which apparently means that the error made the tokens be deleted from Firebase.

We were using version 5.x and recently updated to 7.10, but the issue happened while using both versions.

I keep investigating but i'm currently out of ideas.
Any thoughts on this?

[jeromegamez]

Hey Pablo,

I think this could have something to do with Firebase expiring tokens that have been inactive for more than 270 days.

When stale tokens reach 270 days of inactivity, FCM will consider them expired tokens. Once a token expires, FCM marks it as invalid and rejects sends to it. However, FCM issues a new token for the app instance in the rare case that the device connects again and the app is opened. Source

This would explain why the first message reports an invalid field (the expired token), and after that the "Not found" error.

One way I could think of resolving this issue is to send a message with the Messaging::sendAll() method and the validateOnly parameter set to true for all tokens in your database. You can then catch all tokens that are reported as invalid/not found and delete them from your database.

If you're using the latest release, the sendAll() method should be fairly fast - if you have a ton of tokens, you could use a queue and multiple workers to speed things up.

Let me know if this helps!

[ppbittencourt1993]

Yeah, I don't believe its an issue with the package, feels more like a curse.

We are not using Firebase topics. We keep track of who we should send the messages to on our database.

This is an example of a message payload (sorry I had to hide most of it):

I was able to get some tokens that were deleted from the database due to Firebase considering them invalid. They were valid yesterday.
OBS: I have removed 5 characters from them.

ef-g9dh4bkRZlrX9ZdeAs1:APA91bGkhK1zlIMNb0fvS-ams1TZHDPTdmEG66za0IXHDiH9P9hlH9A-4A50HTVRieaN8DkdhRvMbIzR8qjqyBk3gLcoqiyHGLOlWVwvASCmNSmhhS4RP7n1xoeVEnwwiG0yAst

eX9QJjyvx0VMtVIu8qwsd4:APA91bFSJRon0VcWEQExGM_sNI6vToBFuFVeBvHjOFH6X-77x-N7i1WLywvNqjON7oZKns9_Fc2qe2FdExjzsGWvBN1iqtZfTn9P79c-0drvxFO3ErCw9v8CzfgsvTG4wBHwpP_

cheEBjVyf08bvXcyhXJQ7H:APA91bGTfgPz3j7F5iITJvebFiej5J9QUNSdBLy-mPwoLB5YeEAnctiStdMuEOVqNIPRw0ulxQxwU5-c80RckaBJ_yB9dZfztlPgCf8Ozl51HLb_GhW87dtiZxJq-BFqalqtMRc

I could not spot anything wrong. They all have 163 characters like the valid tokens.

[jeromegamez]

I wish the SDK actually had a community, then perhaps someone could chime in, because I'm out of ideas.

I think the best way forward would be to open a support case with Firebase directly, as far as I know it's not paid support:

There's also a Google Group at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/firebase-talk and a Slack Workspace at https://firebase.community/

[ppbittencourt1993]

Will do that,

Thank you very much for your assistance Jerome, you are awesome!

[jeromegamez]

You're very welcome! 🌺 Let me know if you find out more and/or if Firebase support can help you, I'm curious myself! If I come up with another idea, I'll let you know, too!

[ppbittencourt1993]

Will do that, thank you again!