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Geolocation is one of the most widely used APIs in mobile apps today. From weather to Uber and Lyft, the device location is crucial information and many APIs use it to determine what services and products are available in a given location. When building a mobile app in Appery.io, using the Geolocation API is simple. Apache Cordova library is built-in in every new Appery.io app. Invoking Geolocation will return the latitude, longitude (and other) information which can then be passed to any REST API. The following two short videos show how to use and invoke Geolocation in an Ionic and jQuery Mobile apps:

• A Quick Guide to Using Geolocation API (Ionic App) 
• A Quick Guide to Using Geolocation API (jQuery Mobile App)

Looking for more videos like that? Check out our YouTube channel for many more videos.

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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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);

With just a few quick steps, you can easily add any 3rd-party Cordova plug-in to your Appery.io app:

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

To manage all of the Cordova plug-ins for a particular app, go to Project > App settings > Cordova plug-ins and you’ll see the list. You can quickly enable or disable any plug-in.

Learn more 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!

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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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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There are a lot of tools out there for mobile app developers looking to maximize their time and skills while building an application, but the sheer number of them can be overwhelming. Our six favorite tools are PhoneGap, jQuery Mobile, AngularJS, Bootstrap, MongoDB, and V8 JavaScript Engine. Here’s how each tool can assist you in the development process.

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Enterprises are adopting mobile technologies at an unprecedented rate. As Business News Daily recently reported, 1.3 billion workers will go mobile by 2015, and with that massive number, the need for enterprise mobile apps can only skyrocket.

With that increase, many mobile app developers will be called upon to create internal mobile enterprise apps. These apps have many requirements and considerations that differ from the typical app destined for the public app stores. In this article, we will take the top three challenges and share some tips on how to meet these challenges:

1. Security
2. User Interface
3. Choosing a Development Technology

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We just published a bunch of new UI themes. We took all our existing themes and updated them to look modern and flat.

Example of one of the new themes

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