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Easily import any Cordova plugin

You can now easily add any 3rd party Cordova plugin to your app. This has been one of the most requested features. No more sources digging and long step-by-step guides. This is how quickly you can add any Cordova plugin to your app:

1. Go to the Github page of the plugin and download the latest stable version by clicking “Download ZIP”. It’s important to download the stable or Release version.
2. Go to Resources > Cordova pluginsand click Import Cordova plugin, then: Choose file, locate the downloaded file and click Import plug-in The plug-in will appear under Cordova plug-ins

And you are done — it’s that’s easy.

Quickly add any Cordova plugin

To manage all Cordova plugins for a particular app go to Project > App settings > Cordova plugins and you’ll set the list. On this page you will also see the Core Cordova plugins – these plugins are automatically available in your app. From this page you can easily manage the plugins. You can quickly enable or disable any plugin.

We think it’s a very nice capability that you will like. To learn more, please read the documentation for more details.

API Express enhancements

API Express allows quickly exposing a relational database via REST APIs. In this update we have added a number of important features.

New service builder components

The API Express Service Builder – a visual tool to build your custom services has a number of new components. These components simplify building your service logic.

Easily build custom services with new logic components

You can learn more about the new components here.

Comparison query operators 

A set of comparison query operators were added to Find operation to make your requests more effective. Here is the operators list:

• $eq – Matches values that are equal to a specified value.
• $gt – Matches values that are greater than a specified value.
• $gte – Matches values that are greater than or equal to a specified value.
• $lt – Matches values that are less than a specified value.
• $lte – Matches values that are less than or equal to a specified value.
• $ne – Matches all values that are not equal to a specified value.
• $in – Matches any of the values specified in an array.
• $nin – Matches none of the values specified in an array.

Learn how to use these operators in examples.

API Express project import & export

Now it’s possible to save your API Express project locally by backing it up.The project can be restored from the exported backup as well. It’s really simple, so you have to go to API Express > Settings and click “Export Backup” to save your API Express project locally. Click “From backup” when creating new API Express project and choose previously stored backup to create a project from the backup. A little bit more about these features is here.

Quickly add a REST API to a controller with drag and drop

A faster way to add a REST API to an AngularJS app

When building an AngularJS app, there are useful snippet called “Invoke service”. The code to execute a REST API service will be added to your scope function when clicking on it. All you have to do is change “service_name” to your actual service name:

Drag and drop a service into an AngularJS controller

We now made it even simpler to add a REST API to a function. Just drag and drop the needed service from Services folder (to the left of the screen, where project tree is located) to your function and you’re done! Even the service name will be automatically substituted:

Edit scheduled pushes for faster development

You can now easily edit scheduled pushes. This means you no longer need to delete a scheduled push in order to make a change. There are few ways in Appery.io to send a Push Notification:

1. By sending the REST request using the Push Notifications API.
2. By calling the appropriate methods in Server Code.
3. By using the web console.

All three methods support scheduling pushes. From now, Server Code and Push Notifications API’s were complemented with new methods to get the list of scheduled notifications and to remove them.

By using the web console you can achieve more functionality when editing scheduled pushes. You can remove them as well, but you can also change notifications content and lot of other options including push message, its sound and devices. Read the doc for details.

Push Notifications API changes

If you built an AngularJS app or jQuery Mobile app (library version 3.0), please make sure you are aware of these API changes:

New version of Appery.io Push Notification plugin has different way to read the message. The changes only concerns AngularJS apps and jQuery Mobile app with libraries version 3.0. If you ever wrote the event.notification.aps.alert code, you should replace it with new variant. So, find your code that looks like:

event.notification.aps.alert

And replace it with the next string:

event.detail.message

That’s all if your making the jQuery Mobile app, but for AngularJS one more step should done. Find PushRegisterDeviceImpl JavaScript file (under JavaScript folder) and replace the entire file with the code provided here.

Happy app building with better Appery.io!

Appery.io Server Code allows you to quickly write any custom app logic using JavaScript and expose is via a REST API. Here is an example of invoking the Uber API, and here is an example of accessing the cloud database and scheduling the script to run periodically.

Sending push message

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Dynamic URLs are very common in any mobile app. When building AngularJS apps with Appery.io there are few ways to make parts of the URL (or even the entire URL) dynamic. We’ll use this URL for our example: http://mywebsite.com/name/{id}/edit , where the {id} part should be dynamic.

1. First of all, you can use the Settings service to perform dynamic substitutions:
   1.  Create a new Settings service (if you don’t have one yet) by going to CREATE NEW > Service > Settings (REST settings).
   2. Then, create a new id parameter in the newly-created Settings and provide a value for it.
   3. Now, go to your REST service, and change the dynamic part of your URL to {MySettings.id} where MySettings is the settings service name, and id is the name of the parameter. Your URL should look like:           http://mywebsite.com/name/{MySettings.id}/edit
2. Alternatively, you can create request parameters directly in the REST service. They will be automatically substituted if names coincide. You can use this approach if you need visual Mapping for dynamic parameters:
   1. Go to your REST service Request > Query String.
   2. Create the new id parameter and provide a value for it.
   3. Change the REST service URL to http://mywebsite.com/name/{id}/edit.
   4. Because the value of the id parameter will be automatically inserted to the {id} placeholder, it won’t be added to the end of the URL as a query string.

Read more about the REST and Settings services in AngularJS.

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

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About the Organization

Located in Maharashtra, India, the Bharatiya Mahila Federation (Thane Samiti) [Thane District Chapter] is an Indian charity dedicated to improving the lives of Indian women. They are an affiliate of one of the oldest Indian women’s organizations, the National Federation of Indian Women (NFIW).

The organization helps women and children in a multitude of ways, from running family counseling centers to putting on street plays to highlight women’s struggles against poverty and violence.

Problem

The organization needed to solve a dire social problem: Many Indian cities have a large percentage of their population living in crowded and congested housing without individual bathroom facilities. The people living in these conditions rely on poorly maintained community facilities, which are usually built by local governmental authorities.

The people who use the facilities cannot afford to spend hours or days navigating the bureaucracy to file a complaint about the conditions and manage repair requests. Further, the complaint resolution process is complicated, with little accountability.

Solution

The organization decided that there must be a better way to file complaints and request maintenance: a mobile app. Cell phones are widely used in India, with about 75% to 80% of the population using them. The rationale is that even amog poorer populations, some people in these areas will have smart phones, which can be used to file and monitor complaints.

The organization designated Appery.io as the platform they’d use to build their app, which they will offer to the affected municipalities. The app will have four modules: a citizen module, a municipal officer module, a contractor module, and an initial facility survey module.

The goal, according to Dr. D.G. Mahajan, a volunteer with the organization, and creator of the app, is to facilitate repair and maintenance of the facilities.

After investigating the best methods to build the app, Dr. Mahajan decided to go with Appery.io. He cites a number of reasons for his choice:

• It comes with immediate access to essential components such as GPS, Camera and Map features.
• It offers a hosted solution for development and the final app, and allows for easy app testing.
• Its excellent training materials, user forum, and support.

Further, Dr. Mahajan says, the platform’s learning curve is short, and the platform itself is flexible, giving developers the ability to build an app via a visual editor and edit the source code.

Results

Over 42,500 people are projected to use the app to file and manage complaints in Mumbai alone. If the app is successful, the organization plans to expand its reach into other Indian cities.

According to Dr. Mahajan, the success of this app will mean improvement in the lives of tens of thousands of people: “If we are successful in reducing the number of unusable facilities due to maintenance issues, then that is a benefit to people living in low-cost areas.”

Price Increase Coming November 8th – Subscribe or Upgrade to Lock In Today’s Price!

On November 8th, 2015, we will be revamping the online pricing for the Appery.io platform. All the details are available in this post on our blog, but here are the main highlights:

• A new 14-day free trial of the Pro plan will replace the free Starter plan.
• A new Team plan will replace the Premium plan.
• We have updated our Basic, Standard, and Pro plans along with our pricing for developer seats.
• We have also added some custom enterprise offerings.

Read the rest of this entry »

Outline view

When building complex UI for your mobile app, it can become difficult to quickly select needed components. It can be even more complicated if there are many levels of nested components. A Grid component, for example, contains rows and columns, while each cell contains Buttons, Images and HTML. Some cells can even contain another Grid. By using OUTLINE view you can see the UI structure in simple hierarchical way. You can open or hide OUTLINE view by clicking the button to the bottom of the screen, nearby the components palette.

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

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

Appery.io Server Code enables mobile developers to write any custom app logic that is automatically exposed via a REST API. You develop the script using JavaScript (which is nice, since you don’t have to learn a new language). Server Code provides built-in APIs to make it easy to integrate with other Appery.io services. For example, you can query the Appery.io Database, send a push notification, and invoke any 3rd-party REST API service.

For example, let’s say you want to develop a script that will query a products database. If an inventory for a particular product falls below a set number, you want to send a push message to a manager notifying him or her that inventory is low.

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Dependency Injection (DI) in AngularJS is one of the core capabilities of the framework. You simply specify on which objects a particular controller depends, and AngularJS will automatically (and somewhat magically) inject those objects into your controller without you needing to do anything. In other words, you are going to get a reference to the objects that you need without doing any work.

Read the rest of this entry »

Appery.io Dependency Manager

Another great built-in Appery.io tool is the powerful Dependency Manager. It can be used to add new dependencies to your app, manage the asset loading order, add initial logic for dependencies, and much more. You can load resources any time it is required in the project (not only while loading the app). This can be configured in a simple, visual way with the Dependency Manager.

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

Do you want to build apps fast? Start developing with our free plan.

In this video tutorial you will learn how to build a mobile app that allows you to scan a product barcode and save it into a relational database. The tutorial covers:

• Connecting to a relational database
• Exposing the database via REST APis using Appery.io API Express
• Designing the app UI with the Appery.io visual App Builder
• Generating REST API services
• Using and binding API services in the app
• Testing the app on device using the Appery.io Tester app

Learn from other videos on our YouTube channel.