Category: deploy

When you deploy your project, App Studio sends an extra file to the server called the manifest. It contains a list of files which are part of your project and should be downloaded to the device, so it can run offline.

When we released App Studio in 2010, the ending for this file was .manifest. Someone noticed that Microsoft was already using .manifest for another purpose. A few months ago, the standard was changed to .appcache (though .manifest is also fine.)

In App Studio 2.5, the default for new projects is .appcache. Existing projects will continue to use .manifest and work fine. You can control the ending of the manifest file in the new ‘manifestfile’ Project Property.

If you want to use .appcache in your project, you will need to a few things:

1. Change manifestfile in Project Properties
2. Delete your project completely from your server and do a full deploy.
3. Make sure your server gives a MIME type of text/cache-manifest for .appcache files. More info is here.

One of the benefits of using .appcache is that some servers are already configured with the right MIME type. An interesting one is DropBox: if you deploy your project to the Public folder of your DropBox, people can run it from there.

While SQLite databases work very nicely on mobile devices, there is no easy way to get them there. You can’t just add the name of your database to the manifest and be able to use it when your app is deployed.

Until App Studio 2.5, that is. When you add the name of an SQlite database to the manifest field in Project Properties, App Studio will automatically convert the database to a format which can be transferred, then convert it back into a database on the device.

Let’s see how this is done. We’ll use the famous Northwind database which comes with many Microsoft products. I went online and found it in SQLite format.
Continue reading “Including Databases with your App”

Note: The problems that DropBox had which affected this method were fixed on Jan 28, 2013. Everything is working again!

Looking for a way to make your apps available to the world without getting your own website? DropBox could be the answer: best of all, it doesn’t cost anything.

DropBox, if you haven’t used it, lets you put a directory of files from your system in the cloud. To you, it just looks like another directory on your PC or Mac. Behind the scenes, the content of the directory is mirrored on DropBox’s servers. Where it gets really cool is that you can have that same directory on other computers – yours or your friends. Sign up is free, and you’ll get a couple of gigs of storage.
Continue reading “Deploying your app via DropBox”

For development, put the PHP files for your project right in your project folder. You can then use any text editor that you have installed on your system to edit them.

Next, add the file names to the manifest in Project Properties. When you do a Full Deploy, they will be copied to the server with the rest of your project.

The result is that your PHP files will be placed on the server, in the same folder as your app. Your app can call a PHP script by just giving the file name – no path name will be needed.

You may have read the recent blog entry called Ajax made Simple. Today we’re going to extend that a bit and talk about using the POST method.

The last blog post discussed the simplest Ajax call, which sends data to the server by adding it to the end of the URL, a method called, rather misleadingly, GET. But what if we want to send more data? GET has a limit, some say, of around 2000 characters. For more than that, we’ll use the also badly named POST method. POST has an upload limit on most servers of 8 megabytes. If you need more, server settings can be adjusted.

Let’s look at some code. You’ll see it looks very much like our last post:

Function btnAjax_onclick()
  req=Ajax("ajaxPost.php","POST",txtSend.value)
  If req.status=200 Then 'success
    htmResponse.innerHTML=req.responseText
  Else 'failure
    htmResponse.innerHTML="Error: " & req.err
  End If
End Function

The difference is a couple of extra parameters. We add “POST” and the data we want to send as a separate parameter. Before we talk about what is going to happen at the server end, let’s see what the app looks like:

OK, here is the PHP code on the server which we are calling:

<?php
 // uncomment the next line to see runtime error messages from this script
 // ini_set('display_errors','1');
 
 // Get the data from the client.
 $myText = file_get_contents('php://input');
 // Send back the text, reversed
 echo "Data received from Device (reversed):<br>" . strrev($myText); 
 
 //write the data out to a file on the server
 //make sure permissions are all OK!
 $myFile = "AjaxPost/ajaxPost.txt";
 echo "<p>Writing data to " . getcwd() . $myFile;
 $f = fopen($myFile, 'w') or die("can't open file");
 fwrite($f, $myText);
 fclose($f);

?>

The file_get_contents(‘php://input’) call gets the data, exactly as it was sent. We’ll do two things with it: echo it back reversed and we will write it to a file on the server. The first part is easy: anything in an echo statement is sent back to our app:

echo "Data received from Device (reversed):
" . strrev($myText); 

The second part involves a bit more PHP, but is straightforward. It writes the data was received to a file.

 $myFile = "AjaxPost/ajaxPost.txt";
 echo "<p>Writing data to " . getcwd() . $myFile;
 $f = fopen($myFile, 'w') or die("can't open file");
 fwrite($f, $myText);
 fclose($f);

What would you use this feature for?

• Upload a JSON copy of your database.
• Upload some pictures in Base64 format.
• Create a .htm file which can be accessed as a web page.
• Lots more ideas!
  

A tip on debugging PHP scripts
Since PHP scripts run on the server and not on your screen, you don’t get to see the error messages. This can make debugging difficult. If you put this statement at the top of your PHP script, the error messages will be echoed to your app:

ini_set('display_errors','1');

The error messages come back as HTML formatted text. The best way to look at them is to assign them to the innerText property of an HTMLview control.