Documentation on Building Offline Apps with Alpha Anywhere

Richard Rabins

Building Offline Capable Mobile Apps

If you're application is dependent on a network connection, it's not really mobile. This is where offline forms can help. Offline web applications are able to function without a continuous network connection. Data downloaded from the server before the device enters offline mode is cached in local storage. Edits the user makes while offline are also cached until the mobile device can connect to a network again. Once the mobile device is connected, the offline data can be synchronized back to the server.

Building offline apps has never been easier in Alpha Anywhere. In these videos, we demonstrate offline capabilities now available in Alpha Anywhwere. Functionality has been added to the UX component's list control for adding offline support. We walk you through the process of adding offline support to a list control and demonstrate how to store and persist data to local storage.

Getting Started With Offline Apps

The following videos will give you a quick overview of building disconnected applications in the UX component:

Watch Video 1 - Setting up a List with a Detail View using the Quick Setup Genie
Watch Video 2 - Editing Data and Persisting Data to Local Storage
Watch Video 3 - Introduction to Hierarchical Data Structures

Click here for more documentation for the new offline tools now available in Alpha Anywhere.

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About Author

Richard Rabins

Co-founder of Alpha Software, Richard Rabins focuses on strategy, sales, and marketing. Richard also served as CEO of SoftQuad International from 1997 to 2001, when it owned Alpha. In addition to his 30 years with the company, Richard played a key role as co-founder, and served as president and chairman of the Massachusetts Software Council (now the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council), the largest technology trade organization in Massachusetts. Prior to founding Alpha, Richard was a project leader and consultant with Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), and a management consultant with Management Decision Systems, Inc. Richard holds a master's degree in system dynamics from the Sloan School at MIT, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and master's degree in control engineering from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has served on the boards of Silent Systems, Legacy Technology and O3B Networks, and is co-founder of Tubifi www.tubifi.com.

The Alpha platform is the only unified mobile and web app development and deployment environment with distinct “no-code” and “low-code” components. Using the Alpha TransForm no-code product, business users and developers can take full advantage of all the capabilities of the smartphone to turn any form into a mobile app in minutes, and power users can add advanced app functionality with Alpha TransForm's built-in programming language. IT developers can use the Alpha Anywhere low-code environment to develop complex web or mobile business apps from scratch, integrate data with existing systems of record and workflows (including data collected via Alpha TransForm), and add additional security or authentication requirements to protect corporate data.