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The Appery.io platform provides a cloud database for storing any app data. The database also has a built-in user management feature. This means, if your apps needs user login or user registration, this capability is available out-of-the-box.

Appery.io database built-in user management

The Users collection has two default columns: username and password. In most cases you will also need to store additional users information such as email or address. One option is to create additional custom columns in the Users collection. Another option is to store any user information in a different database collection and then link the Users collection to that collection. In this blog post I’m going to show you how use a separate collection to store user information and how use the Pointer column type to link the two collections.

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One way to customize your app is to use a custom push notification icon. By the default, the push notification icon is your app icon.

Setting a custom icon for incoming push notifications is available only for Android OS and only for version 3 libraries (jQuery Mobile).

To set a custom push notification image:

1. Upload your custom image (for example: icon.png) into the ANDROID/project_name/res/drawable/ folder to set it as a push image. If there is no drawable folder, simply create it:
   
2. On the Source tab, open the WEB_RESOURCES > app > startScreen.js file.
3. Find the PushNotification.init function and add an icon property with 'icon' value:
   
4. Now your app has a custom push notification icon!

Read more about Appery.io push notifications in our documentation and make sure to check out all of our mobile development tips.

Do you want to build apps fast? Start developing with our trial plan!

This is guest post from our partner Apperian, by Tiffany Early, Managing Editor, The MAM^® Blog

As an enterprise app developer, do you struggle with distribution of your apps for either usability testing or final delivery? How do your customers then get apps to their end users?

Security Risks with Public App Stores

The public app stores – iTunes, Google Play – just don’t work for distributing enterprise apps, since your apps can get lost in the millions of consumer apps, be confused with public versions, or be exposed to major security risks.

Headaches of Self-Hosting

Self-hosting and emailing direct download links, portals, shared drives, FTPs, etc. are difficult to maintain and increase your administrative overhead. You have to build security measures into the app before it’s compiled, and there’s no support for the ongoing application lifecycle management of onboarding, inspecting, securing, signing, and deploying mobile apps.

5 New Ways to Securely Distribute Enterprise Apps

Using a mobile application management platform for app lifecycle management and security, you onboard, sign, and wrap your apps with security, analytic, and other management policies. These policy-enabled “managed apps” are then ready to be distributed to your customers in a variety of ways, without requiring access to or control of their devices.

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In this post, we’ll show you how to open a URL received in a push notification message for both jQuery Mobile and AngularJS apps.

This tutorial assumes you are familiar with how to send and retrieve push notifications. If you are not, this tutorial will show how to send your first push notification message.

Let’s start with a jQuery Mobile app.

To open a URL when a push notification message is received, use the Load page event and add the following JavaScript code:

$(document).on("push-notification", function(event, data) {
   window.open(data.message, "_blank");
});

This is how the event looks in the App Builder:

Code to read Push Notification message and navigate to a URL

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In this webinar recording you will learn how to use plug-ins to make mobile app development faster. The webinar covers:

• Running and testing an existing app that uses Server Code to invoke the Uber Products API.
• How to export the entire app as a plug-in
• How to select particular pages or services to export as a plug-in
• How to export the entire app as an app template plug-in
• How to manage existing plug-ins
• How to import a plug-in into your app
• How to create a new app based on a template plug-in

It’s all in this 30-minute YouTube recording!

And, we have many other videos on how to build apps fast on our YouTube channel. Start building apps fast now.

Happy New Year!

In the “Appery.io under the Hood” series, we’ll be explaining in detail how Appery.io works. We hope that this information will give you a deeper insight into how to make better apps by giving you a deeper understanding of the platform.

Loading resources when needed

When developing big scalable web apps, the question of how to manage tons of libraries and services arises pretty quickly. There are a few key reason why a powerful and flexible dependency management tool becomes mandatory:

• The vast majority of libraries dictate their own requirements for dependencies. This makes it critically important to load and launch resources in the appropriate order
• Loading all the libraries and other resources at once increases network traffic and should be avoided when possible. This is even more important for mobile apps
• App loading time can be significantly decreased when loading only the required libraries:
  • A ready event will be fired only once for all the required resources
  • For mobile devices and apps, page size can be optimized as much as possible to prevent browser or OS failures
  • Overloading the device CPU by loading unnecessary libraries will decrease battery life
• The bigger the development team, the more complicated library dependency management becomes

This is why Appery.io has chosen RequireJS to solve the cumbersome process of dependency management. Let’s see how RequireJS is used in Appery.io apps.

RequireJS

RequireJS implements an AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition) approach and allows the declarative description of dependencies among app modules. RequireJS also guarantees that all module dependencies will be resolved before module execution. In the AMD pattern means each module has its own isolated variables area. This makes your app more stable by reducing the possibility of namespace conflicts. 

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We are often asked about displaying a PDF file in a mobile app. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to display a PDF file uploaded to the Appery.io cloud database in your mobile app.

First, upload the PDF file into the Files collection of your database. You can use any existing database or quickly create a new database.

Appery.io Database Files collection

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Configuring your app routing is really easy with the Appery.io Routing tab. You can find it under Project > Routing. When creating a new page, a route for it will be created automatically. You can then change its name or select needed dependencies, which is really convenient.

Then, in your code, you can get to that page using Route name this way:

Apperyio.navigateTo("Screen2");

Routes with dynamic parameters are available as well. You can find out more about it (and, generally, about the Appery.io routing feature) in our documentation.

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

Do you want to build apps fast? Start developing with our trial plan!

Every Appery.io app comes with the Apache Cordova library automatically installed. This means you have access to default Cordova APIs such as Camera, Contacts, Geolocation, and more. Many users also wanted to add 3rd-party Cordova plugins to the app. To make this process very simple, we’ve added a simple wizard. In this tutorial you are going to learn how to upload a Cordova plugin to your app and use it. You will build an app that will track your route and draw it on a map. The app will do this in the background. (This is a popular feature in fitness apps.)

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PayPal API is one of the most popular Appery.io plug-ins, and now it’s also available for Ionic & AngularJS!

Our users have frequently requested the ability to add payments to their Ionic & AngularJS mobile apps more quickly, for example, to create an online shop. Now, with the help of this plug-in, you could build an online shop (for instance) to be used by your Ionic & AngularJS app really easily.

A few notes about the security implemented in this app:

• Authentication with PayPal occurs via a Server Code script. It takes your PayPal app credentials and sends XHR to PayPal. The token is stored to the database.
• By using the Secure Proxy feature, the actual token value will be substituted on the server side. This way any PayPal API can be triggered.
• Because of the server-based authentication, sensitive data such as the client secret or token value will never be shown in the app, which eliminates the possibility of theft.

Finally, a few, more general, notes:

• The flow implemented in this plug-in is similar to PayPal’s flow.
• We have a PayPal API plug-in tutorial here. Check it out to configure the plug-in.
• The plug-in is configured for a test environment, so use the PayPal guide too see what you need to do when going live.