Getting to Know Azure Mobile App Cont.

Microsoft Azure Mobile App has recently gone GA (General Availability) and has definitely captured my attention. Mobile App is a tremendous accelerator that enables us to go from an idea to a functional prototype quickly. Then, we can continue to build on that initial investment to create a robust production ready app. Finally, this post is all about using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to build and publish apps to HockeyApp, so that we can test and assess quality before our apps make it to our favorite app Stores.

So far, we’re using Template10 to build a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) Mobile App and we’re using Microsoft Account as an Identity Provider (IDP). This all got built using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and distributed to testers using HockeyApp.

Now that we’ve got the basics out of the way, let’s build something.

Working with Data

As previously mentioned, Azure Mobile App is an accelerator and the goal of this post is to walk through the pieces that allow us to Create, Read, Update and soft Delete (a.k.a. CRUD) data from an Azure SQL Database.

Getting to Know Azure Mobile App Cont.

Microsoft Azure Mobile App has recently gone GA (General Availability) and has definitely captured my attention. Mobile App is a tremendous accelerator that enables us to go from an idea to a functional prototype quickly. Then, we can continue to build on that initial investment to create a robust production ready app. Finally, this post is all about using Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to build and publish apps to HockeyApp, so that we can test and assess quality before our apps make it to our favorite app Stores.

Refreshing Authentication Tokens

Authentication Tokens are short-lived and having users login to the App frequently can cause friction. This is definitely undesirable and can be dealt with by identifying when a Token is no longer valid. When this condition is met, we can attempt to refresh the Authentication Token by calling the Azure App Service Token Store APIs.

Troubleshooting – IIS RequestFiltering

The Microsoft Azure App Service can host Web Apps that are built using various stacks. Although we aren’t using .NET for our App, it’s important to remember that this service uses IIS to route traffic to the underlying Application Servers. Whether we’re using PHP or Java, we need to be familiar with the Web.Config. This file has its origins in ASP.NET and is used to configure the IIS pipeline.

If you’re uploading resources through your Web App, chances are that you’ve observed the following error message.

The request filtering module is configured to deny a request that exceeds the request content length.

Web.Config Example

This example, configures both the maximum request length and the maximum content length. This file must be placed at the root App.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
  <system.web>
    <!-- maxRequestLength is in kilobytes (KB)  -->
    <httpRuntime maxRequestLength="4194303" />
  </system.web>
  <system.webServer>
    <security>
      <requestFiltering>
        <!-- maxAllowedContentLength is in bytes (B)  -->
        <requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength="4294967295"/>
      </requestFiltering>
    </security>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Things That we Should Keep in Mind

• maxRequestLength is in kilobytes (KB)
• maxQueryString is in bytes (B) and of type uint. Its default value is 2048
• maxUrl is in bytes (B) and of type uint. Its default value is 4096
• maxAllowedContentLength is in bytes (B) and its default value is 30000000, which is about 28.61 MB. Its type is uint, and its max value is 4,294,967,295 bytes = 3,99 GB

Resources

• requestFiltering Element for security [IIS Settings Schema]
• requestLimits Element for requestFiltering [IIS Settings Schema]
• Configure web apps in Azure App Service
• Azure App Service web app advanced config and extensions

The Adventure Begins

Azure offers many interesting opportunities. For a longest time, I had no reason or time to explore different stacks. Over time, Azure has changed the way I play the game, now it’s all about using the best tool for the right reasons.

Azure is a rich ecosystem of services (a.k.a. Lego Blocks), technology stacks and standards. If something is missing, we can usually overcome the challenge by bring our dependencies with us. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) allows us to work in a familiar environment. And Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings, like Azure App Service, allow us to focus more on delivering business value at a faster pace.

This adventure marks the first of many, where I will explore how I can use multiple stacks on Azure App Service. Let’s start with JSP. Azure Web App has supported Java for a while, and this post is all deploying that first workload. Let’s dive in!