Posts Tagged “mobileservices”

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Excel and Mobile Services take 2

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I have updated the code from my recent post, Using Excel to edit Azure Mobile Service table data, to support Insert and Update.

In order to delete a record, you’d need to have a cell from that record selected, then click on the Delete icon on the Add-Ins ribbon menu. The only requirement is to actually have a value in the first cell of that line.

In order to Insert a record, you’d need to set the fields, and keep the id empty, then click on the Add (plus) icon on the Add-Ins ribbon menu when a cell in that new record’s row is selected.

Using Excel to edit Azure Mobile Service table data

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When building apps for Mobile Services, you often need to manipulate the data stored in your table from an admin point of view.

The management portal of Azure does let you browse your data, but not edit it.

A few days back, Amit showed on his blog a way to create a simple data manager as a Windows 8 Application, using the official SDK.

I however like the UI of Excel for data editing, so I wanted to create a simple editor that taps to Excel mechanisms, and uses the unofficial SDK to communicate with the mobile service.

The results can be seen in the following recording (you’d want to watch it in HD):

How?

First, I created an Excel AddIn project in VS2012. Then I grabbed the latest SDK file from github, and added it to the project. Lastly, I changed the AddIn code to look like that gist (you’d need to set your app url and key), and ran the project.

Current limitations:

Using Azure Mobile Services with Windows Phone

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Windows 8 app building is great With the new awesomeness that is Azure Mobile Services, building a cloud-connected application became much easier.

Now you just probably say “I wish it would have worked with other client platforms as well as Windows 8”

Guess what? HTTP The service is actually talking to the SDK via HTTP, and the Windows 8 SDK that is published along is a (very rich, awesomely done) wrapper around that HTTP API. Given that, I jumped ahead and implemented a (very poor, awfully done) SDKs for Windows Phone. Disclaimer #1 What you see here in this post and other related ones is 99.999% guaranteed to fail for you. It is a hack job that I put together in a few late-night hours, and it is *not endorsed by the Mobile Services team. It is likely that if and when we do come up with an official WP SDK, it would be looking different. Very different. Even the HTTP api that I’m using here is likely to change by the time the service gets out of Preview mode. codez You can peak at some of the usages for the API in the following gist:

In follow up posts, I will cover the API more, and I will also be adding xml comments to the SDK to make it easier to use. How to get it? Head over to https://github.com/kenegozi/azure-mobile-csharp-sdk.you could either clone the repo, or just navigate to /src/MobileServiceClient.cs , click on the ‘Raw’ button and save it in your project.You’d need to have the latest Newtonsoft’s Json.NET referenced as well (if you don’t have it already).A NuGet based delivery is in the works.

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