I'm working on a game-companion app and I was looking for a neat way to fetch data from multiple APIs initiated by starting my app (and maybe also if the user is refreshing the current page with swipe-to-refresh).
The thing is, I planned a dashboard-style homescreen (mostly reduced data from every API), where the user can navigate to different pages (all fed with different API's) and get detailed information for the specific section. I'm not sure how I can provide the API-data 'globally'.
I feel like my main.dart would be way too overloaded, but i can't think of any other way.
What's your thought on that?
Few approaches:
You can use a persistent db and write a wrapper DAO over it that such that anybody with access to this DAO object can write and read from DB. Packages like sqlite help in this regard.
If you are adopting bloc way of state management in your flutter app, then you can create blocs which could be used to share data across your app. flutter_bloc is a good place to start with this.
Via Singleton , If you want a sensitive data that needs to be available within the app globally, then you can create a singleton class that provides read and write from a secure vault. For this secure vault, flutter_secure_storage is convenient or shared_preferences for non sensitive data
Related
After I got into the basics of React Native and developed some components, I did some research on how state management is being organised in larger apps and am trying to find out what I should be focusing on to learn those days. At first it seemed to be obvious to me that I would be using Redux, but it seems a lot of people are happy using GraphQL in a way that makes Redux even obsolete after implementing it. Now there's also the Context API and I'm wondering what you would be choosing today when writing an entire new React Native app that would be interacting with 3rd pty APIs a lot.
Thanks and regards,
Dennis
The answer depends on a lot of different factors. There are some cases where choosing one over the other makes more sense, but ultimately the decision is up to you. Nevertheless, let's look at some scenarios where it might make sense to use each of these options.
Redux
Redux is best suited for applications that need complex state management and a single source of truth. Typically you would wrap your entire application in a Redux provider so that the state of your entire application changes when this store changes. So this is best used when you have state that is used in many different places throughout the app and needs to be available to every component. An example might be that of a game where a player's actions impact everything around them. Here you could dispatch actions to Redux when a player takes damage or levels up to increase enemy difficulty.
Context
Context is (in my opinion) simpler to use than Redux and is useful for sharing state between a group of components. This is not necessarily for the entire app, although it can be and would effectively be a simpler replacement for Redux in that case. Rather, Context is used in situations where you have deeply nested components that need state from a parent several layers up, or for components that aren't nested within eachother but need the same data in order to work together. An example of when to use context would be in designing an image editor. You could have an image component wrapped in a filter component wrapped in a crop component wrapped in a sizing component and not want to pass the props down to each level every time. So you would wrap the top most layer in a provider and have each nested component be a consumer. You could also have a toolbar that can change the sizing, filter, etc. and so they would also be consumers and would call functions passed in by the provider. The rest of your app would have its own state and would not change when this state changes.
GraphQL
This is useful if you need to pull in state from several differnt APIs or backend services and combine this state all at once. This is dependent on either fetching from a preexisting GraphQL API or by setting up your own to pull in data from your other endpoints. Since you said you would be interacting with a lot of different 3rd party APIs, you could set up an Apollo server to retreive data from them, or use a service like AWS AppSync with Lambda if you want a managed GraphQL service. The beauty of GraphQL lies in that you can query for only exactly what your application needs at any given time. So instead of the APIs dictating what data the client can access, it is the client that tells the APIs what it wants, and then GraphQL gets it in an efficient manner. A perfect fit for this style of state management would be a blogging application. Here you need to pull in information on an author, and get all of their posts, and get all of the comments on their posts, and get their user info, and then get how many followers they have, etc. Where each of these pieces of data would normally be served from their own REST endpoint, you would end up making dozens - and in some case hundreds - of requests to your APIs and pulling in a huge amount of unnecessary data. With GraphQL you can declare what you want in the shape that you want it and pull it into your app in a single request. This would save you a lot of trouble in trying to see if your APIs have all returned a certain piece of data yet or not, and so you don't have to write a thousand if/else statements in your components. Only one would be necessary. However, GraphQL tends to be much harder (in my opinion) to setup compared to using Redux and Context. So be prepared that there is a tradeoff here. When people switch from Redux to GraphQL, they usually switch to the Apollo library in order to make use of their local state management and cache systems. These are not technically a part of GraphQL but are rather just nice add-ons that Apollo provides.
So that's just a general overview of the strengths and weaknesses of using each option. Again, which one (or which combination) you end up using really is dependent on your app's requirements. My suggestion is to experiment and find out.
I have been using Firebase Web SDK for my react-native app (I am using FIRESTORE to store the data). Up to this point, I have had no problems. It all works smoothly. But now I want to add some kind of offline storage mechanism to my app so that I could still offer some functionality or display some content that was cached from the last connected session even if my users are offline. After some investigation, I have the impression that react-native-firebase is the preferred way to go. Now I have some questions and I like to get some advice from the experienced.
Is react-native-firebase the only option to go? I have quickly read about AsyncStorage and it is just a key-value storage. Considering the simplest thing I want to do is page through a list of firestore documents, this kind of storage seems not to be suitable to do this offline. Like If I wanted to do this with AsyncStorage I would have to put all the content (maybe hundreds of documents) I get from the firestore backend, persist them as a single string value, fetch them back, parse them, page them etc. And write custom logic& methods for all these.
If I was to use react-native-firebase, just enabling the offline storage -I assume- takes care of this for you and you don't have to write any custom logic for offline storage usage. I assume the data that has persisted for offline usage has the same structure as it does in firestore database. I feel like If I use anything other than react-native-firebase, I would have to handle all the custom logic for persisting, reading and rendering the data offline myself. Is that right?
The biggest concern I have is the amount of code refactoring that might be required. I have many lines of code and so many .get().then() like lines where I get and render the data from firestore. In the documentation of react-native-firebase it says:
...aims to mirror the official Firebase Web SDK as closely as
possible.
I am not sure to what extent this is true. I have checked the react-native-firebase's firestore module's reference documentation but I just can't tell how many of these querying methods are actually supported.
So, the way to go is react-native-firebase's way? Would it take a heavy toll on me trying to refactor the existing code? Any similar experience do you have?
I would appreciate any help.
Thanks a lot...
Maintainer of the react-native-firebase library here.
...aims to mirror the official Firebase Web SDK as closely as possible.
This is a minor disclaimer as there are some differences between the two, mainly down to how certain things have to be implemented with React Native.
For example, enablePersistence does not exist on RNFB. Instead, persistence is enabled by default and can be toggled off (or on) via settings().
Is react-native-firebase the only option to go? I have quickly read about AsyncStorage and it is just a key-value storage. Considering the simplest thing I want to do is page through a list of firestore documents, this kind of storage seems not to be suitable to do this offline. Like If I wanted to do this with AsyncStorage I would have to put all the content (maybe hundreds of documents) I get from the firestore backend, persist them as a single string value, fetch them back, parse them, page them etc. And write custom logic& methods for all these.
This is technically possible, however there are downsides to this as you have mentioned. With Firestore, when the device goes offline (quite common on apps) and you attempt a read/write it'll read/update your local cache, which will still trigger event listeners. When the app goes back online, it'll automatically re-sync with the server for you.
If I was to use react-native-firebase, just enabling the offline storage -I assume- takes care of this for you and you don't have to write any custom logic for offline storage usage. I assume the data that has persisted for offline usage has the same structure as it does in firestore database. I feel like If I use anything other than react-native-firebase, I would have to handle all the custom logic for persisting, reading and rendering the data offline myself. Is that right?
This is all handled for you. We wrap around the native Firebase SDKs so expect the same level of consistency if you were developing a native Android/iOS app if not using React Native.
The biggest concern I have is the amount of code refactoring that might be required. I have many lines of code and so many .get().then() like lines where I get and render the data from firestore.
Generally everything is the same apart from a few minor methods for reasons mentioned above.
So, the way to go is react-native-firebase's way? Would it take a heavy toll on me trying to refactor the existing code? Any similar experience do you have? I would appreciate any help.
I'd recommend anyone developing with React Native & Firebase to use RNFB. It provides a lot of extra functionality the Web SDK cannot provide with React Native. Apart from a more cumbersome setup & changing imports, it should work very much the same.
I got a project assigned where we already have an up and running website and one of our clients wants to be able to track statistics from the website.
We want to make this available to all our clients as soon as we finish the development. Note that each 'client' have their own 'subdomain' to say so. Eg. www.website.com/client1 , www.website.com/client2 , etc. And we want to track the usage separately for each of these clients.
We will need to create statistics based on the usage of our own platform, pull in data registered by Google Analytics and also pull in data from a 3rd party which they will offer by an API of their own (they have a 3rd party solution that uses the data accessible via our API).
All this data needs to be shown on a webpage with graphs and tables.
I wanted to make sure we choose the right architecture from the start, in order to avoid scalability issues later on.
Started reading about Private and Public API's lately.
For now, we do not have another (internal) application yet that would use our own statisics, it would just be the website using it. But in order to be able to scale-up later if needed, and another application would like to use the statistics I think a private API would benefit us greatly.
In order to allow 3rd parties to use the statistical data we chose to let out, I was thinking of creating a Public API.
Is a Private&Public API the correct way to go about this?
One of the questions I am stuck with is how does the architecture for these API's look like. Mostly, right now we already have a public API regarding vacancy data. This 'API' is basically just a PHP class (controller) inside our CodeIgniter solution. It gets called via its URL and returns a JSON object with the results. (e.g. www.website.com/api/vacancy/xxx)
In order to create a (proper) private & public API solution/architecture. Should the API be set free from the website (CodeIgniter)? What are the common go-to solutions for this?
Or is it fine to keep it in our current platform the way it is now? (and people call the stats API via www.website.com/api/stats/xxx for example?)
It's almost always right to go with microservices like architecture so your initial thoughts sounds reasonable. Acting like this will give the possibility to scale and deploy your api independently and also will help you avoid performance side effects to your site (and vice versa). Pay attention how you access your main site data from within the new api if you don't want to finish with a monolith application.
Regarding the API i would suggest you to implement protocol like oauth2 in order to achieve the flexibility you (might) need. Also you can use swagger to document and test your API.
All i said might helps you a lot but first you have to answer yourself do you really need to go so deep or you just need a simple solution.
I think multitenancy is the best choice. Generally speaking, multitenancy is when every customer has own database. Data is separate. The codebase is same and already exists. As I understood the project is in progress status. You do not redesign and rewrite anything.
I'm working on a web application which consists of various pages that rely on ajax calls (via AXIOS) for either fetching data from the server or communicating data back to the server. However, the data that is fetched from the server is 99% of times intact during the lifecycle of a session meaning that it will not be changed (i.e. only displayed to user while involving very low update frequency). Moreover, this data, is just pure text including links to contents, formatted as a JSON Object.
I have just found about Vuex, and I have been thinking about packing all these get Ajax requests scattered across different components and centralize them in a Vuex Store in a way that, when the application loads, all required data would be fetched from the server so that no more communication with the server to get such data during the lifecycle of the session would be needed (while only getting the contents such as images, audio, etc via links).
Is Vuex appropriate for this purpose? Is this a good idea at all (based on the concept of speeding up navigations)?
As mentioned in the comments, Vuex is meant to manage complexity and in your case you are planning to fetch 99% of the data at the beginning for your app. So, in client-server aspect, you totally don't need it. Keeping your data structured would be enough.
However, you have also the notion mutation in Vuex. The idea is that you can update the core data only using mutations. In this way, you are protected from unwanted changes and you have a better insight how/in which order your data is changing. So, if you have complex operations on your data (fetched from server and also your apps logic), Vuex would be a good choice.
There are also another interesting features for different kind of apps. Note that is just another trending way to keep your data structured. There are also another strategies but since Vuex is regularly maintained by Vue core team (and it seems to be also in the future), I would suggest it. Especially, if your app keep growing, you will love it more and more. After reading core concepts of Vuex (or better its logic behind Vuex: FLUX), you will have better insight about it.
I'm creating an app that relies quite heavily on Core Data. It is a content-driven app that primarily delivers question/answers to the user.
On its first load, the app delegate pulls through lots of data from an SQLite into the app's persistent store. The data is basically lots of content that is not only in-app purchasable, but is also copyright-protected.
Normally, developers requiring encryption/protection for Core Data need it for storing sensitive user-data. However, as in this (my) case, I would need to protect the persistent store from external access from anyone or any source (including the user), purely due to the fact that I don't want someone to be able to download the app's entire Intellectual Property from the persistent store.
I noticed on the iPhone Simulator that locating the persistent store and opening it (with an SQLite browser) was no trouble at all. This is a little worrying, and so, if this is also as easily possible for a release installation on a device, then I would like to know:
I don't necessarily want to go all-out on encryption, as I've found ways to do this row-by-row (lazily), so is there a quick way to obfuscate/scramble a persistent store?
This article shows how to encrypt individual attibutes(of course you can encrypt all attributes).