Suggestions for building an app

Mobile Apps
#1

I would love to build an app that allows us to create estimates from our own database of items and then side load it to the android tablets in all of our trucks.

I know I could build it with a web page using our mysql database but I’ve never made and app. This would be a perfect project for me to learn.

Is there a walk through somewhere?

#2

It sounds like you want to have both a web app for users in the office and a mobile app for the trucks.

This is totally possible with Wappler. You’ll want to create two projects if you don’t already have the application build for the mysql database you mentioned.

  1. Create a Web project.
    This will be where you most of the logic for your app will live (users, authentication, tables related to estimates, etc.)
  2. Create a mobile project.
    This will allow you to connect to the remote web project for authentication and loading/modifying data from different tables from the web project’s database.

If you already have the application built and only want to create a mobile app, then this is possible as well as long as your existing application exposes APIs.

If you want to get fancy you could add a SQLite database to the mobile project and sync data by using the Action Scheduler to periodically look for new data. You can also do this with the most recent CouchDB and PouchDB component as well. Just a word of caution, I ran into memory issues using PouchDB, so it may not be ready for production use yet.

3 Likes
#3

It’s not complicated, as Keith says, you’ll need two projects, one for the data and one for the mobile app.

Take a look at this:
Setting up a mobile project with capacitor

Using dynamic data in desktop and mobile apps

You’ll need a site with ssl, and maybe you’ll fight with cors, there is a friendly advice on this topic:
Tutorial: Storing cookies/Maintaining user login on Android/Ios

Good luck and anything you need, just leave here a question :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#4

Sounds like a great use case for PWA.

3 Likes
#5

I was thinking exactly the same, PWA would be my choice. Far easier to create / maintain.

#6

Ok using this approach could I authenticate the “device” as approved somehow to restrict access?

#7

You could use a user log in system, registered users could log in with any device. Non registered users wouldn’t gain access.

#8

With a native app, you could easily do it
The capacitor device plugin returns all the device info, including an id. Not sure with pwa.