iOS 11 came out of beta on September 19th. But, don’t worry. The Appery.io team is close to putting the final touches on our full support for the new version of the iOS. As soon as it’s ready, we will be announcing it here. Stay tuned!
We are now using MongoDB v3.2 Geo 2dsphere indexes (instead of 2d), which corresponds with MongoDB documentation and requires stricter validation. More information can be found in the section on the GeoPoint data type of our reference. Also, check out these examples.
Another month, another platform update! Here’s what’s on for the coming August update coming in a few days.
We have updated our Android Cordova library version to 6.2.2. This version will be selected automatically in new projects.
Also, we now support Android SDK tools 26.0.1. This means more features, more plug-ins available to import, and being able to export
Appery.io projects to the latest Android Studio.
Until now API Express services didn’t have a limit on request size, but we know that some of you really need this option. In this release, you’ll see this message if the body of the request is more than 5 MB:
{
"code": "AE018",
"message": "Body request max size is exceeded",
"status": "REQUEST_ENTITY_TOO_LARGE"
}
In previous releases of Appery.io JS and CSS files were executed by creation date. Yes, this was really annoying in some cases. Now you can go on the App settings tab, open Resources, and select the order of these files. For instance, simply drag the CSS3 file and drop it on the top of the list and this file will run before the CSS1 file if you like.
There are are a lot of different stats you might want to know about a database: longest requests, successful requests, error requests, information about collections with issues, selected operation, and much more! All of this data is now available on the Statistics tab of your database. Just look at the screenshot:
Our users can already use system fields in their queries (a really useful capability). So for better performance, we have added a possibility to create indexes for system fields. Check it out!
In Appery.io, you can easily build an app that provides a UI that switches among several languages with the updated and improved i18next plugin.
A large number of bugs were fixed by our development team. You’re gonna like it!
As always, we want to get your feedback. You can always email us (support@appery.io) or post on our forum.
This blog post supplements “OAuth Login with Google App” in the Appery.io documentation.
Since April 20, 2017, all OAuth requests through InAppBrowser are blocked (see http://blog.ionic.io/google-oauth-changes/ for details). Now it’s necessary to use the Google Sign-In Cordova/PhoneGap plug-in.
So, first of all, download the plug-in and add it to the project (more details on this). When ready, you can proceed with specifying the settings for iOS or Android apps. We’ll describe both ways and then show you how to set up your app at the end.
Ready!
keytool -exportcert -keystore path-to-debug-or-production-keystore -list -v
keytool is a key and certificate management utility.
It is included in the jdk, you can install either jdk or download the keytool utility.
window.plugins.googleplus.login(
{
'scopes': 'https://www.googleapis.com/auth/drive' // optional, space-separated list of scopes, If not included or empty, defaults to `profile` and `email`.
},
function (obj) {
Apperyio.storage.token.set(obj["accessToken"]);
Apperyio.navigateTo("WelcomeOnDevice");
},
function (msg) {
alert('error: ' + msg);
}
);Please note that the selected Android certificate will only work with the release option enabled.
Here are some highlights of what’s coming in our June platform update rolling out on June 25th.
We have added a new component for the Ionic palette in Appery.io, the Slide Box. It’s a simple component that allows you to create a pretty handy little widget for your mobile application. The Slide Box lets you embed a set of images (or random HTML) and then display them one item at a time.
Now you can grab Cordova plug-ins directly from GitHub, which is faster and easier. Just find the plug-in you want on GitHub, click the Clone or Download button and copy the plug-in’s URL.
Then, in Appery.io, go to the Resources tab and find the new Cordova Plugins tab. In the tab, click on the green Import Cordova Plugins button, select the From Git tab in the dialog box, and paste the link to the plug-in that you copied from GitHub.
From now on, when you open your projects you’ll see this plug-in among the imported plug-ins.
We received a few requests to make work with panels more comfortable. So, we have added a close button on the Outline and Palette panels. Also, you can easily switch now between normal and small buttons. Hope you like it.
The issues we had with database export were annoying, but we have good news. We have fixed this critical bug. And even more… Now you can export individual collections from your database. Hope, you’ll find this useful.
We know you want to know more about your Server Code script usage, and now you get this option. Select your Server Code, click on the Statistics menu item, and you’ll see the new tab called Reports. There you can find information about your Server Code activities filtered by date.
The Ionic and Bootstrap Google Map component was updated. Now we use the more stable version 2.1.6, Errors in the previous version have been fixed.
Most of you have Facebook accounts and want to have Facebook integration in your apps. With the latest Android SDK version included in this release, you’ll find that the Facebook4 plugin is supported.
Now SVN and ICO images are supported by our Media Manager. More pictures in your apps!
Now, when you download your certificates from Appery.io, you’ll find SHA1 and SHA256 certificates in the exported zip file. These would be useful for Firebase integration.
No update is complete without bug fixes. So, yes, we fixed a great number of large and small bugs to make the platform better.
If you run into any hiccups with this release (Hey, we aren’t perfect.), please reach out to us via the forum or by sending us an email (by signing into the platform and clicking the Get Help link at the top).
Being able to send Push Notifications to users is one of the fundamental capability in an enterprise mobile app. Appery.io platform comes with Push Notifications component out-of-the-box and allows you quickly to send targeted messages to iOS and Android devices. In this blog post we will show the four ways to send a Push Notification message to a user:
This first option is probably the simplest way to send a Push Notifications once you have installed an app on a device. Select device types, enter the message and send. The Push Notification message should arrive on the registered device instantly.
Push Notifications console
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and a digital payment system with 5.8 million users. In this blog post, you will learn how easy it is to build an Appery.io hybrid app to accept payments in bitcoins. It just takes a few simple steps to build the app and ready the payment ecosystem.
First, you need to get a merchant sandbox account on the BitPay server at https://test.bitpay.com/get-started. There are other payment servers, but BitPay currently is the largest and oldest bitcoin payment processor in the world, serving industry-leading merchants on six continents.
Next. You need to import a plug-in that will be the prebuilt (mostly prebuilt) client app. To do this, when the App Builder loads, choose the creation From Plugin option and check the BitPay App plug-in. (Learn more details about how to build an Ionic app in Appery.io.)
Then, you need to add one more piece to Appery.io, the BitPay Cordova plug-in. Go to https://github.com/bitpay/cordova-sdk and save this repository as a ZIP file. Upload this file to Appery.io to install this plug-in. (Please read this for more information about installing Cordova plug-ins into Appery.io.)
Next, Generate a BitPay API token with point-of-sale capability without client authentication at https://test.bitpay.com/api-tokens. With this done, get back to your app to set the token value. At this point, a distribution certificate should be associated with your app as described in https://docs.appery.io/docs/appexport-certificate-management.
Finally, as a customer making purchases with BitPay App, you need a bitcoin wallet installed on your phone. A bitcoin wallet is an app that lets you receive, hold, and spend bitcoins. This list shows bitcoin wallets supported by BitPay.
And, one more thing. After all of this is done, please make sure you switch to a merchant production account on the BitPay server at https://bitpay.com/get-started.
That’s all. Now your app is ready to take bitcoin payments.
EveryoneAPI by Telo allows to convert a phone number into real business intelligence with a simple API request. The complete reverse phone append product is simple to use, yet powerful and built for developers by developers. As you probably already know, integrating with any 3rd party REST API using the Appery.io Server Code is also simple. In this blog post, I will show you how to invoke a test a script that calls the Everyone API.
To start, create a new Server Code script with the following code:
var telephone = request.get("telephone");
var url = "https://api.everyoneapi.com/v1/phone/"+telephone;
var auth_token = "AU83e975.....";
var account_sid = "AC659275.....";
var XHRResponse = XHR2.send("GET", url, {
"parameters": {
"auth_token": auth_token,
"account_sid": account_sid,
"pretty": "true"
}
});
Apperyio.response.success(XHRResponse.body, "application/json");
The only thing you need to do, is to replace the auth_token and account_sid with values from your account. Sign up for an account here. It’s fast and simple.
The phone number for which you want to get information is passed as a parameter to the script (line 1). To test the script, switch to Script parameter tab (on the right side), enter a parameter called telephone and then set it to a test value. Here is an example testing the API using the Appery.io telephone number:
Server Code script
Once you finished and tested the script, you easily import into your app. This video shows how to do that.
Looking for more APIs by Telo? Check out the CallerID Server Code plug-in:
Plug-ins
This plug-in creates a Server Code script that integrates with OpenCNAM API. The OpenCNAM API allows you to get caller ID information for phone number provided.
Geolocation is one of the most widely used APIs in mobile apps today. From weather to Uber and Lyft, the device location is crucial information and many APIs use it to determine what services and products are available in a given location. When building a mobile app in Appery.io, using the Geolocation API is simple. Apache Cordova library is built-in in every new Appery.io app. Invoking Geolocation will return the latitude, longitude (and other) information which can then be passed to any REST API. The following two short videos show how to use and invoke Geolocation in an Ionic and jQuery Mobile apps:
Looking for more videos like that? Check out our YouTube channel for many more videos.
The Appery.io Database provides storage for your mobile app data. You can store data such as users, orders, purchases, products or anything else. The Appery.io Database is a cloud NoSQL database and provides a very simple and elegant REST API to work with the database.
One of the most common cases for an enterprise mobile app is to create/save a new item/record and then redisplay the list in the app with the newly created item.
Accessing the database directly from the client is fine but requires two requests to the database.
A better approach is to do both the create and list in a single request from the app. This is very simple to do from Appery.io Server Code script. The following script shows how to create a new record and then get the updated list:
var dbId = "cdaec951....d8";
var collectionName = "People"
var newName = request.get("name");
var newTitle = request.get("title");
// Save new object into the collection
Collection.createObject(dbId, collectionName, {
"name": newName,
"title": newTitle
});
// Retrieve updated data from the collection
var result = Collection.query(dbId, collectionName);
// Return the updated list (including the new object)
Apperyio.response.success(result, "application/json");
In this simple script you first create a new Person object (line 8) and then do another query to get the updated list of people (line 14). The script response returns the updated list of people. This script automatically has a REST API which is the invoked from the app.
What’s most important, there is only a single request from the app to the Server Code script. A single request is usually better than two requests. Also, you can add additional logic to the script without impacting the app. For example, you can send an email when a new person is added. Or, you can send Push Notification when a new person is added. All this can be done without impacting the app. That’s nice.
If you want to learn more about Server Code, check out our YouTube channel Server Code playlist.