I just feel like spreading a little gratitude and thanks back to the Tadabase Team and community this glorious Friday!
It’s over a year ago I started on this journey with Tadabase and I had a vision and set myself a goal of replacing our company’s 15 year old antiquated MS Access database with 250,000+ records, 100+ tables and goodness knows how many 1,000’s of lines of visual basic code into a state-of-the-art system (Tadabase). Once completed, phase two, I wanted a native (Apple & Android) mobile apps published to the app stores for our customers to access their Tadabase records and accounts. Well today that final phase was completed as Apple and Google just approved the the apps into the app stores ! yay! Incidentally , having native apps is great as I have the advantage of having push notifications to the phones so I can keep our customers updated on various aspects of the work we deliver to them.
In due course, if anyone is interested in knowing more, I’ll happily share some videos and details but for now I just wanted to thank the team for listening and supporting me on this endeavour. I’ve learnt sooooooo much, achieved far more than I ever thought possible and also just wanted to encourage any others who may be on a similar journey to get your own projects over the line too!
Thanks Tadabase chaps (and chapesses) and actually I should also be thanking the community as without all your support I certainly would not of managed it! Thanks for sharing your tips and helping me out each time I was stuck - each time I’ve posted on the forum I’ve found a solution or workaround (sometimes getting rather creative but where there is a will there’s a way right?
It’s now 3pm UK time so I figures a little celebration is due so I’m off to the pub for an early beer or 4!
Using a mixture of Tadabase API and the Tadbase New Pages & User API I was able to authenticate and retrieve all the records and documents from Tadabase and AWS that I needed.
I’ve been very pleased with the response times, the app is pretty fast and is working well. I used a third party platform called https://www.api2pdf.com/ that is reliable and cost effective for creating thumbnails of my PDF (as I wanted the app to include thumbnails).
Like all platforms, Adalo took a little time to master but once you get familiar with External Collections and Custom Actions it was pretty straight forward. I had to implement a few workarounds in Adalo to make is all work and you do end-up storing what should be app or systems variables in the users table but it’s a reasonable workaround and once understood that approach worked well too.
I create user records in both Tadabase and Adalo for each app user. This allows me to use the Adalo push notification API to message my users.
In Tadabase I can now invite users to my app, and check whether they have downloaded and installed it. If they have then I allow Tadabase to be able to message that account via push notes if we need to instantly message our users.
Incidentally, Adalo were developing and rolling out a feature that allowed you to authenticate with any external user system but due to the amount of support they had to provide they retracted it and instead they have opted to initially partner with Xano BUT this doesn’t mean you can’t achieve an integration with Tadabase user records it just means it a little more time consuming to setup and sync!
The users experience on the app is still good and straightforward… The user can login or register for an account. If they register they can access the app but until we connect their user account to their Tadabase account they can’t access their company documents.
Adalo is a little expensive but for me and this particular project it was the best fit. If I didn’t need the push notifications I could have opted for a cheaper solution and simply wrapped Tadabase inside an IOS and Android app and actually if anyone needs such a solution I have a solution for that so let me know.
I’ll pop “upstairs” when I get a minute, I didn’t realise you were so close - Yes of course happy to share and equally I’d be happy to learn about some of your projects - I hear you’re strong in construction ! - good to share
What do you use to wrap your PWA into a native mobile package?
I was wondering if you could kindly point me in the right direction as this is completly new to me.
Hi @Shumon, well I use two different systems, the more sophisticated platform I’ve used is Adalo but you may know that’s a full app development environment. but that does allow you to do push notifications through the API. It’s overkill if you just want a wrapper though. If you just want a web app (URL) wrapped I use another system that I’m a reseller of and I sell but if you’re interested drop me a DM and I’ll share more. Even if you just want to see exactly how it would work on your web app you can send me the URL and I’ll embed that into our “Apps4U” published app that’s already in the app stores so you can try it out first hand, no obligation. Ultimately you’d need to get an Apple and Android developer account, Apple $90 pa, Google around $25 lifetime. It’s become harder to publish apps for personal use since Google announced that personal accounts need 20 testers, testing your app for 14 days! Any questions feel free to post on here as there are a few things to consider when publishing apps that others might find useful. We’ve been publishing mobile apps for businesses since 2017 so know most of the pitfalls and gotchas.
Thank you @GREDDIE, your response above is appreciated. I’m almost completely new to this topic. However, just couple months ago, I stumbbled across something that enabled me to put a icon on my iphone home screen and when clicked, my tb app opens in full-screen mode using the tb app url link.
Please correct me if I am wrong but I think this is what they call progressive web application (PWA)… right? Earlier this year Apple allowed pwa push notification but excluded EU from having this feature. Im from London and an individual not a business so bad luck for me but Im thinking soon there will be an equivalent which delivers the same function from pwa without going down the costly native app route. Im guessing our new layouts with the notification bell cannt be used to trigger push notifications.
With your help, lets see what else we can learn together. Here is the url with its sneaky sub domain: https://templates.tadabase.io
All content,including user account names, organisation names, email addresses, risk details and mitigation actions … are test data only. The actual program data; Climate Emergency risk register is real and is taken from an excel sheet that is available in the public domain.
There are no Pipes, Plugins, Custom Components, WebHooks, API or any kind of external links to and from this app. I based it on tb default theme and the styling is, what I call, British Racing Green & Brushed Aluminum. Tenant 1 organisation is Britania Plc and the user is a Site Admin.
The tb notifications simply shows number of ‘Open’ status risk mitigation ‘Actions’ that are assigned against the logged in user. This bit works fine but I want to explore the options for converting tb notification into a push notification at zero cost where possible.
Please create account for tenant 1.2 and 2.1 as indicated in the chart. @SuiteUpstairs Cam has already given feed back regarding ‘Profile’ page issues.
but where there is a will there’s a way right? 
cheers
)
- Yes of course happy to share and equally I’d be happy to learn about some of your projects - I hear you’re strong 
in construction ! 
- good to share 
