We can deploy our mobile backend services on Azure using Azure Mobile apps. By implementing our mobile backend service on Azure, our mobile backend will be able to communicate with different Azure services. We can able to take advantage of various features that are provided by Azure Mobile Apps.

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Features and services

Data Storage: Our mobile backend can be able to store the data or access the data of Azure SQL database Azure table storage, Azure Blob storage, and Cosmos DB. And also, we can add offline sync features to our mobile app.

Client-Side development: Once we host our mobile backend services on Azure, there must be a way to consume those services. For that purpose, Microsoft provided several client SDK’s depending upon the platform.

Authentication and Authorization: We can integrate our mobile app with different authentication providers. So we can integrate with Azure active directory, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Twitter. We can integrate this service without any code.

Connectivity: In terms of connectivity to apps that are hosted in a virtual network. Our mobile app will be able to connect to a virtual network either using point to site VPN or by hosting our mobile app backend service into an app service environment, which will automatically get connected to the virtual network.

Availability Service: We can use the traffic manager to provide higher resilience even during the data center failures. We can also use auto-scaling to scale our mobile backend services as more number of users are about to start using our app.

Notification Hub: Using the notification hub, we can enable push notifications to different platforms, and also we can use mobile engagement using which we can understand what exactly the user is doing with our app.

How to create Mobile apps backend development

Step 1: Log in to the Azure portal and create a new Azure mobile app backend.

Step 2: Configure the mobile app backend.

Step 3: Define a table controller.

Step 4: Create the Data Transfer Object (DTO) class.

Step 5: Configure a table reference in the Mobile DbContext class.

Step 6: Create a table controller.

Step 7: Define a custom API controller.

Mobile Client-side development

Step 1: Based on mobile OS, download the client-side SDK.

Step 2: Reference the MicrosoftAzureMobile (IOS) in your client code.

Step 3: Create MSClient (IOS) reference and start accessing data from tables.

Step 4: For Custom API’s, use MSClient.invokeAPI to call custom API.

Mobile offline data sync

Mobile offline data sync is a client and server SDK feature of Azure Mobile Apps that makes it possible to create apps that work without a network connection.

Sync Table

To access the “/tables” endpoint, Azure Mobile client SDKs provide an interface such as MSTable. However, this will fail if the client devices do not have a network connection.
To support offline use, our app should instead use the sync table APIs such as MSSyncTable. All the CRUD operations will happen at a local store.

The local store is the data persistence layer on the client device (Windows, Xamarin, and Android). It is based on SQLite, whereas on iOS, it is based on core data. In offline synchronization, the sync can be a push, pull, implicit pushes, or Incremental sync.

Azure Notification Hub & Mobile Engagement

Azure notification hub provides an easy-to-use, multiplatform, scaled-out push infrastructure that enables us to send mobile push notification requirements in which you want to send notifications to the users. Using the Azure notification hub, we can achieve the same with minimum code and minimum configuration. With a single API call, we can target individual users or entire audience segments containing millions of users across all the devices.

Azure notification hub implements all the functionality of push infrastructure. The only thing we need to do is to write a mobile app in such a way that the mobile app will register the PNS handle with Azure Notification, and our mobile backend will be responsible for sending platform-independent messages to all users and interest groups.

Advantages of Azure Notification Hub

Multiplatform: We can use Azure Notification Hub to send push notifications to IOS devices, Android devices, and Windows devices. And it works with any backend that is developed in any language.

Scalability: We don’t need to worry about scaling. Azure notification hub will take care of that for us. We can scale up to millions without changing anything.

Delivery pattern: We have a vibrant set of delivery patterns. We can broadcast, unicast, or multicast user segmentations. So, we can divide all our users into segments, and we can target a specific part of users to send notifications using Azure Notification Hub.

Working of Azure Notification Hubs

Let’s understand the working of Azure Notification Hubs using a simple diagram.

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Firstly, we need to do is to retrieve the PNS handle from the platform notification service so that our mobile client will retrieve the PNS handle and pass on that handle to Azure Notification Hub via our Azure mobile app backend service. It can be anything. And from that point onwards, our mobile backend service can interact with Azure notification hub to send notifications.

Mobile Engagement

Azure Mobile Engagement is a software as a service user Engagement platform that provides data-driven insights into app usage, real-time user segmentation. And the key thing is it enables contextually-aware push notifications and in-app messaging.

For example, we have an e-commerce website, and some of the users are showing more interest in sports-related equipment. In that case, using Mobile engagement, we can identify those users that are visiting the sports product more frequently. And whether we want to offer discounts or any new sports product that came into the market, then we can send a notification to only those users that are showing interest in sports products.

Another thing that we can do using Azure Mobile Engagement is data-driven insights into app usage. You can see which screen of your app get more engagement from the users using which we can improve our app. We can do all real-time user segmentation based on the user data and also based on the pages they visit, the type of data they search, etc.

The Azure Mobile Engagement can be used with Azure mobile apps, which makes in total a compelling platform for the development of your mobile apps.

So, this brings us to the end of blog. This Tecklearn ‘How to create Azure Mobile App’ blog helps you with commonly asked questions if you are looking out for a job in Azure and Cloud Computing. If you wish to learn Microsoft Azure and build a career in Cloud Computing domain, then check out our interactive, Microsoft Azure Developer and Administrator Training, that comes with 24*7 support to guide you throughout your learning period. Please find the link for course details:

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