Saturday 1 September 2012

Microsoft's Azure Mobile Services... and Mono-for-Android

Yesterday's post introduced a quick implementation of Microsoft's Azure Mobile Services using MonoTouch to build an iOS app.
The WebClient and Json handling was easily refactored into a single class - AzureWebService - which was then added to the existing Android version of the Tasky sample... and now we have the same Azure Mobile Service being access by three platform clients: Windows 8, iOS and Android all with C# (and the iOS and Android apps sharing the service client code).

Additional features have also been added to AzureWebService to allow deletion of tasks. The Android app source is on github and it looks like this (delete has been added to the iOS app too):

Here is a discussion of how the API was reverse-engineered with Fiddler. The REST endpoints that TaskyAzure accesses are:

GET /tables/TodoItem

GET /tables/TodoItem/?$filter=(id%20eq%20{0})

PATCH /tables/TodoItem/{id}
{"id":1,"text":"updated task text","complete":false}

POST /tables/TodoItem
{"text":"new task text","complete":false}

DELETE /tables/TodoItem/{id}

Finally, only a few small updates were required in the Windows 8 example prevent the completed tasks from disappearing and instead make use of the checkbox in a more natural way:

Now all three apps are reading and writing to the same Azure data store! Can't wait for the official cross-platform APIs :-)

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the link back, and nice add on the oData filtering. This further confirms the webAPI application in Azure Services.

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