Create Windows Azure Mobile Services in a few minutes thanks to CodeFluent Entities

You may have heard that a lot of new features were added to Windows Azure during the last few months.

Today we will focus on Windows Azure Mobile Services. First of all, what is it?

Long story short, Windows Azure Mobile Services allows you to expose your data through JSON web services. Microsoft provides SDKs for Windows Store and Windows Phone 8 apps, pre-configured projects for iOS and Android, and JavaScript libraries for HTML.

The SDKs offer a large number of methods that provide access to your data stored in Azure.

So let us create a new CodeFluent Entities project. As an example for this article, we will use the “advertising sample” model. I will also add a class library project which will contain our SQL scripts.

We will not need more for this article since we are just going to generate the SQL Azure database with CodeFluent Entities.

First, we will add the SQL Azure Producer to our project. Regarding the configuration of the producer, we will only set the property “Produce Scripts” of the SQL Azure section to “true”.

Also, and this is really important, we will set the “Produce Schema” property to “true”. This property can be found by clicking on the “Advanced Properties” button as shown in the following screenshot.

You may wonder why this is so important. It is simply because Windows Azure Mobile Services will use the name we are going to define for our service to map it with the schema name of our database tables. So choose it carefully!

In this example, we are going to name our schema “sampleadvertising”. To do so, we have to open the properties of our entities and fill in the schema property as shown below.

Once we have updated the “Schema name” property of each entity we want to expose, we can build our project to produce our database.

When the project has been produced, check the database in SQL Azure to make sure we have our custom schema name on our tables.

Let us go back on Windows Azure to create our mobile service. According to the schema name we used in this example, we will name it “sampleadvertising” and we will associate it with the database created earlier.

Now that our service has been created, click on the “Data” tab of our service to “add a table”. Here we will add tables which names are identical to our database tables; for instance, “Campaign”.

Note: for the purpose of this article we will set the authorization for all CRUD methods to “Everyone”. Do not do the same on production especially if you work with sensitive data.

Those tables are not new database tables, they are only created to associate the tables created thanks to CodeFluent Entities with our mobile service and therefore expose our database data.

Once the table is added, we can access our data from everywhere in a standardized format.

From now on, we will show how to use our data from a sample Windows Store application.

First of all, we need to install the Windows Azure Mobile Services SDK which can be found at this address: https://go.microsoft.com/fwLink/?LinkID=257545&clcid=0x40C

Once the SDK is installed, let us add a new project to our solution, a blank C# Windows Store app, named “SampleAdvertising.App”.

Then add a reference to the SDK we have previously installed.

Let us open the file “App.xaml.cs” to register our mobile service. In our case, we will add the following code:

    <br />public static MobileServiceClient MobileService = new MobileServiceClient(&quot;https://sampleadvertising.azure-mobile.net/&quot;);     <br />

In this particular example, we will not need to register the application key since we have set the permissions to “everyone”.

Now that our service is registered, I will show you how to consume our database data.

For instance, we will query our table “Customer” to get the customer “SoftDia”. To do so, we will create an async method that will get our “Customer” table. Then we will use the “ReadAsync” method with a query filter based on our “Customer_Name” column.

Finally, we will get a JsonObject from this IJsonValue and display its content in our Visual Studio output.

Here is the code used:

    <br />GetCustomerByName(&quot;SoftDia&quot;);</p>  <p>private async void GetCustomerByName(string customerName)</p>  <p>{</p>  <p>IMobileServiceTable customerTable = App.MobileService.GetTable(&quot;Customer&quot;);</p>  <p>IJsonValue myCustomer = await customerTable.ReadAsync(&quot;$filter=(Customer_Name eq '&quot; + customerName + &quot;')&quot;);</p>  <p>JsonObject myCustomerObject = myCustomer.GetArray()[0].GetObject();</p>  <p>foreach (var item in myCustomerObject)</p>  <p>{</p>  <p>Debug.WriteLine(item.Key.ToString() + &quot;: &quot; + item.Value.Stringify());</p>  <p>}</p>  <p>}    <br />

And this is what we get from our “Customer” table

Cheers,

Aymeric ROLAND