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Component context menu

When building a mobile app in the Appery.io visual App Builder it’s very common to place the same component in multiple places. Before, you had to drag each component separately, now there is a simpler and faster to do this with our new copy and paste capabilities.

AngularJS projects in Appery.io use the standard copy and paste functionality that you are familiar with, plus you can clone (duplicate) a component. This means that you can copy your component via a context menu or hotkey (CTRL+C), and paste it even into a different AngularJS project! In order to open the context menu, select any component and click the cog icon.

You can find more information about UI components in Appery.io in our documentation, and make sure you check out all of our mobile development tips.

This is our second major platform update in 2016, we are excited to share our new features and benefits to help you build enterprise apps fast.

New enterprise components in API Express

There are two new features of our API Express, these new service components are for creating advanced service logic using the visual builder. Our new features to API express are:  Script and ServerCode. Both components allow you to write custom service logic using JavaScript.

API Express visual editor enterprise components

• ServerCode component – allows call Server Code scripts from the API Express. This will be beneficial if your app relies on some server-side logic that is written as a Server Code script. Read more about this component here.
• Script component – can be used for changing the body structure before passing the data to another component. Find more on Script component in documentation.

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Today we will show you how to copy pages into Appery.io projects. This very simple process is described in our documentation, but we are going to show you how to build apps faster by copying and re-using pages. 

First create a new app and add some components to the page which you would like to clone.

Page we want to clone

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Popular Bootstrap Grid is available in Appery.io’s Bootstrap project as an UI component that can be dragged and dropped to the page. The following steps show how to change grid cell sizes for different screen resolutions:

1. First open the AngularJS / Bootstrap project and place the Grid component to the page.
2. Now, if you will look at top right corner of the grid you’ll see a green plus button, this button will add a new row to your grid. If you don’t need to add a new row, but want to add new cells to existing row click on one of the grid cells and then choose GridRow through the breadcrumbs:
   
3. A green “+” sign now will add a new cell to an existing row.
4. You can configure the size for each cell for the four screen sizes. Click on the grid cell and the expand Columns properties in the PROPERTIES to the right of the screen. Type a number from 1 to 12 to define how it will look on the screen:
   

Don’t forget that you can emulate page size directly inside the editor, and when testing the app in browser by clicking XS, SM, MD and LG buttons.

Make sure to check out all of our mobile development tips.

This blog post shows how to add a custom logic to a REST API invocation for jQuery Mobile apps.

You may often need to modify data for a services request or a services response. You may want to launch a dedicated JavaScript function to do this. This is useful when you need to rewrite the response data with filtered/edited values, instead of doing this each time for each mapping. For example, your service response has an unneeded first value that you want to remove from the response:

1. Add new Run JavaScript action for Success event of your datasource.
2. Using the drag and drop, move this action to the very beginning, so the Mapping action will be right to the Run JavaScript. This way, it’s guaranteed that the JavaScript code will be executed before the mapping.
3. Click on Run JavaScript action and write your code. You have a data parameter in this JavaScript function – that is your response value.
4. Write your custom logic to modify the response data. For example, to remove the first item of the response array (works only for arrays, not for JSON objects) use the following code:

   data.splice(0, 1);

Debugging your JavaScript apps that are made with Appery.io can be performed in a several ways, but today we would like to share with you another method. This approach has been available before, but for a some reason not many people know about it. The flow is looks really simple:

1. Connect the device to a PC with a cable.
2. Export the Appery.io app as an Android binary (.apk).
3. Scan the QR code to install the app.
4. Launch Chrome and open the app on the device.
5. That’s all! Now you have a really quick debugging tool to test your app with.

You should do a few steps to makes it work, but luckily they are not complicated and you can be ready-to-go in a few minutes.  A detailed guide about this feature and how to set it up you can found here.

The following relates to the projects, which have already been imported as AngularJS Push Plug-in: by improving the AngularJS Push Plug-in, its PushRegisterDeviceImpl JavaScript file was modified. In order to update this file you need to replace its content with the updated one here. Alternatively you can simply re-import the plug-in itself,  making sure that you have removed all of the related assets before doing so. This depends upon the Ionic and Bootstrap projects.

If you experience any problems with new implementation do not hesitate to ask our support team to help you.

AngularJS provides a powerful and convenient way to organise your code via services, factories, directives and more. Here, at Appery.io, we call them AngularJS resources. As usual, in best traditions of Appery.io, we’re making complex stuff easier. So, to create a preferred resource perform, CREATE NEW > JavaScript. Then choose what type of resource you want to create by selecting the needed option from the type drop-down. When clicking “Create JavaScript”, new custom JavaScript will be added to your project with a ready-to-use template of the chosen resource. Inserting a few useful comments in each template will help you to start coding quickly. Afterwards, you can simply use the created resource in scope functions by calling it the Apperyio.get() function:

var my_service = Apperyio.get("service_name");