AWS SNS.publish Extended Message Data

Using AWS SNS in NodeJS to send Push Notifications, and we wanted to append extra data to the payloads. AWS has good docs for the plain text message, but trying to use a JSON Message object in the sns.publish call saw an error like:

016-07-12T16:19:09.713Z - error: InvalidParameterType: Expected params.Message to be a string

After some searching, I found the answer in an AWS forum dated back to 2013. Thought I would repost here for easier reference to myself.

The trick was those extra JSON.stringify calls, once to turn the platform messages into strings, and once to turn the entire Message object into a string. Seems like some odd parsing, but I have received notifications on an Android phone, so at least GCM likes it.