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In today’s fast-paced digital era, the essence of mobile applications is not just in their functionality but in the seamless integration with dynamic data sources. API Express, an integral feature of Appery.io, a leading low-code app-building platform, simplifies this aspect by connecting your app with relational databases effortlessly. For a deeper dive, we’ve crafted a comprehensive video that walks you through every step of this transformative process.

Bringing API Express and Relational Databases Together

API Express acts as the bridge between your mobile app and a relational database. But what’s a relational database, you ask? Imagine a vast warehouse of tables filled with connected data. With API Express, accessing this warehouse becomes as simple as tapping a button on your app. Our video tutorial, available on Appery.io, showcases this with clarity and detail, ensuring you grasp every aspect of the process.

A Video Guide That Makes Integration Easy

Why sift through complicated documents when you can watch a step-by-step video? Our tutorial breaks down everything from setting up PostgreSQL on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to crafting data services within your app through API Express. Here’s a sneak peek at what the video covers:

1. Starting Your Database: Create and configure a PostgreSQL database on AWS. It’s the first step towards building a data-driven app.

2. Managing Data with Ease: Use pgAdmin to manage your database—creating tables, organizing data, and preparing everything for your app.

3. Seamless Connection via Appery.io: Step into the world of Appery.io and begin a new API Express project. This part of the video vividly shows how you can connect your database to your app without breaking a sweat.

4. Customizing Your Data Service: Our video tutorial goes beyond basics, teaching you how to design a data service that tailors your app to utilize database information efficiently.

5. Live Testing: The final step involves testing your setup within Appery.io, providing live feedback on how your app interacts with the database, all demonstrated in the video.

Why Watch the Video?

While this article outlines the steps, the video brings them to life. Visual learners will appreciate the detailed walkthrough, and even experienced developers might discover a tip or two. It emphasizes practical steps, visual cues, and expert advice to ensure your path from a database newbie to a mobile app developer is as smooth as possible.

Dive Deep with Our Video Tutorial

We invite you to watch our video on API Express and Appery.io. Whether you’re developing an app that captures user input, displays real-time data, or manages inventory, integrating with a relational database has never been easier. This video isn’t just a tutorial; it’s your gateway to mastering mobile app development.

Curious about building an app with this setup? Stay tuned. The next video will guide you through creating an app using the service we just crafted.

You can easily upload files into the Appery.io database using our File Read plug-in for the Ionic 5 framework. Watch our tutorial to learn how in just a few steps.

Our new tutorial tells you how to create a connection to a relational database and use it in Appery.io projects. Watch it now.

Unfortunately, recently we had a failure in our databases hosted on Amazon and we lost some part of the data that was added to the databases after December 11th. We are trying to restore this information in the databases, but sadly, there is no 100% guarantee that it will work out and some of the data may be lost. Right now we are doing maintenance and it will run until 8:30 am (EST). Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Winter has come, so it’s time for our newest release! Here are some of our new features:

New build log

We added the ability to view and download your full build log. If your app suddenly has an error that doesn’t allow app compilation, you can check the entire log to see exactly what went wrong. There’s no longer a need to ask support to find the cause. 

Bundled Projects

You can export your Appery.io project with all its dependencies, including Database, Server Code, and API Express projects. This allows you to make a full copy of an existing app in just a few clicks.

Ionic 4 Custom Components

With this release, will be able to create reusable custom components. It can be created in the Create New menu. New screen appears, where you can add predefined components and customize style and logic. And then this set is available to you on other screens in the components palette as a custom component.

New features for the Range component

We added validation of minimum, maximum, and step properties for the Ionic 4 Range component.

Return data object for update operation

Until now we only had the functionality to return the “_updatedAt” field. But since you told us that you want to receive your entire updated object, we are adding the parameter “full_object”  to make that a reality. 

Support for collections JSON 

We have added support for JSON formatting to use for file collection, which allows the following:

Bugs (Less of Them)

No update is complete without bug fixes. Just like we do on all of our updates, we’ve fixed large and small bugs to make your experience smoother. 

Appery.io provides a cloud-based database to store app data. Check out our new tutorial and learn how to manage REST APIs in the Appery.io Database.

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.

1. A request to save the new item/record into the database.
2. Once the 1st request completes, on its success, a request to get the updated list to display in the app.

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.

Appery.io API Express enables enterprises to easily and securely integrate apps with any back-end system. Recently, the Appery team has published two guides on how to create databases with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud SQL and then use them with API Express. If you are new to API Express, start with this beginners tutorial. It shows you how to create services based on API Express models and perform CRUD operations.

Check the API Express 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!

In this post you are going to learn how to access images uploaded to a cloud database via REST APIs and display the images in the app. This is the second post about working with images. You can read the first post here:

Quickly Upload, Display, and Customize Images from the Database with the Built-in Files Collection.

Let’s say you have a list of images, icons, or avatars that you have uploaded to a database. Maybe you are building a contacts app and would like to display employee head shot or just a list of products. Now you would like to display them in your app. In this tutorial we are going to show you how to do that — it’s fast and simple.

Read the rest of this entry »

Virtually any mobile app needs to store data. The Appery.io platform offers an integrated cloud-based database for storing any app data. Every database that you create comes with a number of collections predefined. The collections are:

• Users – for user management.
• Files – for storing binary data such as images and other files.
• Devices – for sending targeted push messages.
• Customer collection – any number of custom collections that you need in your app.

Read the rest of this entry »