Offline Apps (Thankyou Anvil): first Question

Anvil Q&A
1

Really excited about the addition of Offline App functionality but have a general implementation question.

I’ve been evaluating Anvil for a while with a view to creating a full admin system for my business.

One function that I wanted to add was a mobile App that would use Anvil endpoints to get a list of jobs and then update completion status back to anvil immediately if the mobile device was offline or later when back online.

I was happy i could achieve the required functionality with Anvil for the web based Admin system and a low code development system for the mobile app connecting via http endpoints.

However with the arrival of the offline functionality of Anvil I want to see how I might use Anvil for both.

My question is, how to separate the Mobile App from the main Admin system and still get access to the same data (from the mobile app when online)? Or is there a way I can have both the Admin and Mobile aspects of the system in one?

I looked at progressive web apps a while ago and understand a little about manifests and caching. So I assume (perhaps incorrectly) that it would not be good practice to cache my entire admin system on a mobile device when the users are only going to access 3 or 4 mobile specific pages.

Hope the rambling above makes some sense, but happy to expand if needed.

I’m just really excited about the possibilities…

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Can you tell a little more about your mobile app? How was it built?

I doubt Anvil will be able to help with the mobile app since local_storage was for browsers only. You might wanna check out for a native way to do it using whatever framework you used.

3

Hi @apearce,

It looks like you want to create two separate apps with access to the same data. You can do this with Anvil! Just create a second app, and add the Data Tables from your admin app. That way, both apps have access to the same data. (You can even use the same Users table with the Users service in the two separate apps.)

If you have common code that you want to use from both apps, you can factor it out into a third “library” app. You can then add that app as a dependency to your admin and mobile apps. That way, you can use the Forms, Modules or Server Modules from the library app in both places.

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4

Excellent, Thanks @meredydd.

Guess I should have read the data tables docs for that one, duh!

P.S. Thank you for the Offline App functionality. This is huge!

5

Hi @divyeshlakhotia. You maybe didn’t see the latest Anvil functionality email - Anvil now supports Offline apps (PWA), with local storage access.

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