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Wondering how to generate a PDF file in your mobile application? Check out our new tutorial and learn how to add the jsPDF library to your project.

Validating user input is one of the most important requirements in a mobile app. The most common approach of form validation requires that you check the form fields before the form is submitted; this is to make sure that the required information is supplied. Today we will show you how you can validate the input fields in your app before submitting the information to the Appery.io Database.

In this example the app will have following simple design:

Form app design

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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.

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One of the core benefits Appery.io platforms provides is the ability to customize any app with custom code. While the visual builder offers speed and simplicity, being able to write code, add 3rd party libraries gives you the flexibility you need to customize the app as much as you need. In this example we are going to show you how to build an app with infinite scroll feature — as you scroll down, list data will be automatically loaded.

You will create an app that loads a list of dog breads. As you scroll in the app, the data will be loaded automatically. The app looks like this:

App with infinite scroll

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With Appery.io visual mapping editor, it’s very fast and simple to map data between the UI and REST API services:

REST API mapping

There are cases where straight mapping might not be enough. In other words, you need to take data from the page and format it before making it input to a REST API. That’s exactly why the visual mapping editors allows to write JavaScript code — this allows you to customize the mapping as needed.
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Selecting a date via a Datepicker component and querying a database by date is one of the most common tasks a mobile app will do. With Appery.io’s out-of-the-box cloud database and auto-generated APIs, querying the database is fast and simple.

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Being able to launch the native dialer app or SMS app from the app you are building might be a very useful feature. For instance, the app you are building might display a list of restaurants in the area with a phone number. You want to be able to click the number and call the restaurant. This functionality can be easily done with calling the “tel:” or “sms:” and passing the needed values. Here is the simple Appery.io app that contains just a two buttons:

Here is the JavaScript code for the “Send SMS” button:

window.location.href = "sms:+375292771265?body=Hello from Appery.io!";

Such code will open the SMS typing window with predefined text and phone number as following:

Second button has the following JavaScript code:

window.location.href = "tel:+375292771265";

Clicking on that button will open the dialer with pre-populated phone number:

It is not possible to programmatically call or send SMS without opening the appropriate window due to the security reasons.

iOS has some nuances when dialer or SMS window should be opened. Try to use such code for iOS platform:

window.open('tel:+375292771265', '_system');

Or for SMS:
window.open('sms:+375292771265?body=Hello from Appery.io!', '_system');

Please also note that these protocols (tel: and sms:) might work differently depending on OS/browser versions. On Android, you might get different functionally depending what app is selected for sending SMS messages.

Instead of using the native SMS app, a number of services such as AT&T and Twilio provide APIs to send SMS messages. Appery.io has plugins for AT&T and Twilio SMS API.

Cloud Services

In the past year or so, we have witnessed a major shift from client-server to client-cloud. This shift is primarily fueled by two factors: mobile devices exceeding desktop computers and the thousands of different APIs available on the Internet today. What started in early 2000 on eBay and Amazon has become a real revolution in 2012 with thousands of companies, from Twitter and Facebook to AT&T, offering cloud-based services.

REST API
One of the most common ways to access private or public service APIs is via REST requests.

In the client-server approach an organization builds applications that consume its own internal content and resources. However, even large IT organizations such as AT&T, Verizon and Amazon have come to realize that they are no match for the social consumer and social enterprise developers out there. By making APIs publicly available, these organizations hope that developers and “citizen developers” will come and build applications and mobile apps on top of their services.

Citizen developers at work
Analysts at Gartner see a trend toward app creation independent of IT. They predict that by 2014, citizen developers – employees outside of IT and software development – will build 25% of new business applications. In 2007, they built less than 5%.

One of the best-known API success stories comes from Amazon: Its cloud service APIs let outsiders access the company’s massive data centers. Twitter, with its deceptively simple 140-character message model, exploded thanks to its API. In fact, you probably read and write tweets via a Twitter application or mobile app rather than going directly to Twitter’s Web site. Facebook’s Graph API has spawned a whole industry of apps to support its hundreds of millions of users.

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You can extend the functionality of any Appery.io component by adding custom JavaScript. Today, we’ll see how the Google Map component in Appery.io can be used to display driving directions both visually and as text.

With the help of the Google Directions service, we’ll create a mobile page similar to the directions example listed on the examples page for the Google Maps API. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you know how to take advantage of custom JavaScript when working with Appery.io visual components? You can easily access any Appery.io component in JavaScript via the Appery.io JavaScript API and manipulate it with the jQuery Mobile API. Here is an example of how to dynamically add items to a list using JavaScript. Read the rest of this entry »