Create an Application Definition for a Mobile App
2019-01-10
Beginner
15 min.
Create an application definition that enables you to manage the application.
You will learn
- How to set up a mobile application so you can manage the application, the connections to the back-end data source, and other application-specific settings
Prerequisites
- Development environment: Apple iMac, MacBook or MacBook Pro running Xcode 9 or higher
- SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS: Version 2.0
- Tutorials: Enable SAP Cloud Platform mobile service for development and operations
The SAP Cloud Platform mobile service for development and operations provides various mobile-centric services, such as authentication, device registration, logging and proxying of back-end services. All these services are app specific. This allows having several that are set up using different settings.
Technically it would be possible to skip this step and access an OData services directly, but leveraging the SAP Cloud Platform mobile service for development and operations has several advantages:
- Your app is always communicating with the same Mobile Services end-point. If you want to use another service, you don’t have to change the app, as the eventual end-point stays hidden for the app. It suffices to point your mobile services end-point to the new service.
- Mobile services contains a device registration feature that allows a device to be de-authorized when the device is e.g. lost.
- Mobile services have features that allow the user not to have to re-authenticate every time they launch the app, as long as a token is securely stored and re-used when the application is launched again.
- Mobile services provide out-of-the-box features to configure your app on an app-specific, user-specific or device-specific level. It is e.g. possible to set a particular device of a user to debugging-level to gain better insight into what is happening with the application
- Mobile services provides analytics features to monitor usage of your application per platform, device type or user group.
This tutorial described how you can configure a mobile app in SAP Cloud Platform mobile service for development and operations.
Step 1: Make sure mobile services are enabled in your account
Step 2: Go to the Mobile Services cockpit and bookmark it
Step 3: Create the application definition
Step 4: Initial application definition created
Step 5: Add Sample Back End Feature
Step 6: Examine application definition
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