Beginner
Create an Application Definition for a Mobile App
2019-01-10
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
Got to the SAP Cloud Platform cockpit and click on Services in the main menu. In the Services page, make sure that under Mobile Services the Development & Operations service is enabled. If it is not enabled, enable it by clicking on it an pressing the Enable button.
Step 2: Go to the Mobile Services cockpit and bookmark it
After you clicked on the Development & Operations tile in the services list, you will see a link called Go to Service. Follow this link to go to the mobile services cockpit.
As it is likely that you need to return to this cockpit after you have created the application ID, it is advisable to bookmark the page by pressing ⌘D (Control-D on Windows).
Step 3: Create the application definition
Log on to your SAP Cloud Platform mobile service for development and operations cockpit, and navigate to Mobile Applications > Native/Hybrid. Click the New button, and in the dialog, add the following information:
| Field Name | Value |
|---|---|
| Configuration Templates | Native |
| ID | com.sap.tutorial.demoapp.Demo |
| Name | Demo |
Step 4: Initial application definition created
After entering the application details press the Save button to save the new application. You now see the application definition details:
Take a note of the Incomplete Configuration message next to the Connectivity feature. This will be solved in the next step.
Step 5: Add Sample Back End Feature
When the application is saved, you will be able to define more application configuration details. For this tutorial series, you will use a sample OData service included in SAP Cloud Platform mobile service for development and operations.
Click on the Plus button next to Assigned Features to the right. A dialog now opens:
Select Sample Back End from the list, and click OK.
The Sample Back End is now added:
As you can see from the Entity Sets drop-down, the sample service contains quite a few entities. You may click the Generate sample sales orders and Generate sample purchase orders a couple of times to generate dummy data for these entities.
Step 6: Examine application definition
Click on the application name Demo in the breadcrumb at the top of the page:
You are navigated back to the Demo application overview page. You’ll notice the Incomplete Configuration message next to the Connectivity feature is gone now.
Click on the Connectivity row, and you will notice the OData endpoint for the Sample Back End is configured:
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