Xamarin.Forms and azure mobile apps with existing sql database

Question

I have an MVC application in production, hosted on Azure. Now I would like to develop Mobile app using Xamarin.Forms and Azure Mobile apps. The goal is to use the same database on both mobile and web. After reading available documentation online, I haven't found the way that would suffice my needs. I would like to know what is the fastest and best way to achieve that.

Is it enough to add necessary fields to existing entities that I would use in my mobile apps? Meaning adding fields like: Version, CreatedAt, UpdatedAt, Deleted and add another Id field of type string ex. MobileId (because current database uses autoincrement ids of type integer). Is this approach Ok, or should I do it some other way?

Any suggestion/advice would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Azure Mobile apps is an accelerator and a way for devs not familiar with backend development to quickly create a backend for mobile apps. Since you already have a backend, you can simply add API methods in your MVC app that your mobile app will call. You will not benefit from some of the features that the SDK provides but you won't have to change your database structure.

Answer 2

You don't need to create a backend mobile app and in most cases you probably shouldn't. Is your app hosted in app services? If so there really wouldn't be any major differences between leveraging (and expanding as needed) the controller layer of your application. In most cases the datastore won't need to change to accommodate a mobile app vs a web app. Usually you want the datastore to change and evolve based on the features that you want your application to support as opposed to the plataforms that are consuming those features. It's usually a good idea to add an abstraction layer(s) to shield the datastore from platform specific requirements.

That being said there are a few Azure services that you should consider adding to make your life easier when developing Xamarin apps:

• Notification Hub (provides an abstraction layer over the platform specific push notification services for ios and android).

• App center (provides very useful telemetry data about crashes and errors that occur in your Xamarin clients).

• App insights, it provides really good additional telemetry data with very powerful out-of-the-box visualization and querying capabilities for both web apps and mobile apps (I would configure app center to feed its telemetry data to App Insights).

If you provide me with more details about the application I would be happy to give you more detailed suggestions but the recommendations above serve as a good starting point for almost all the mobile application projects that I have encountered.