Android App

[fmanarelli]

Hello,

I need to create a Android App that access my Business Catalyst Database. How to begin? What tools and language i will use to develop this app?

Thanks

Flavio Oliveira

[Liam Dilley]

- You will need to develop your android app

- Your app will need to communicate with a service you create

- The service you have talks to the BC site

Authentication and API work here will be needed. BC's fully public API is its SOAP API.

[fmanarelli]

OK, Thanks, but my question is more specific. How can I expose data from my BC site so it can be accessed from my Android App?

The documentation is not very clear, nor are the available samples.

Thanks!

Flavio

[Liam Dilley]

There are a lot of reference stuff:

CampaignList_Retrieve | Business Catalyst Support

But I think yourself asking the question means this may not be something for you to undertake.

You will need to have your own server to communicate and authenticate the requests and pull data to your app.

Your android app development depends on what you are using to code it etc, you doing native, you doing a c#/.net migration process, java, a platform like phoneGap?

It will all depend on your setup.

[TheBCMan]

I developed an android and iOS app backed with BC data. I made simple pages to output the data I needed using liquid and json=true in the querystring to get JSON. For most things you can make your own API and query it that way. There are limits to this method but it works. If you wish to use the SOAP API you could bake your username and password into the app but I would not recommend it as you would exposure yourself if someone decompiled your code. Use a middle man server as Liam suggested.

Any development tools will work, if you are familiar with HTML and javascript I recommend Cordova or Phonegap with jQuery mobile.

[Liam Dilley]

Not very secure that though.

[TheBCMan]

Its quite secure, only use HTTPs, put the pages in a secure zone and can only access them until the user is logged in (in the app as well). People are not going to guess the URLs, even if they sniff the router traffic to see the URLs they still need to be logged in to get the data. In my situation anyone that was logged in was able to see all the data anyway.

It also depends on the the app requirements, but this worked for what I needed to do and was secure. Every site / app is different.

[Liam Dilley]

Good I know not to do this knowing some things with BC then

We will never do apps this way

[fmanarelli]

In fact, I'm working on my website with liquid tags and am studying PhoneGap and Cordoba to develop my application. Initially I thought of using the dynamic access to data, but analyzing my development needs, will replicate data in BC to a local file because the data flow is very small in the application.

In many cases, the users needs to access data, but this data in app don´t change. But i will in this direction, to access data in Adobe BC.