Alpha Software Blog



Automatically Save a user's location data in your business mobile apps

For many developer's of business mobile apps, keeping track of where users are, and when they are editing critical business data can be very valuable. Incredibly useful in a wide variety mobile app use cases, the upcoming version of Alpha Five allows you to automatically save a users location data when updating a record and store it as a lat/long value. This powerful functionality can be added quickly and easily to your business mobile apps by setting a few server-side properties and can be incorporated with Alpha's sophisticated set of mapping, GPS and GIS capabilities--including the ability to fully customize your maps parameters, add multiple markers, perform proximity searches, and much more. Storing user location data in your business mobile apps In the video below, you'll see that by changing some properties in the 'Save Submitted Data to Tables' action, a user's location data can be automatically saved to the table as they update a record. If the table contains a Geography or Geometry field, you can also encode this field at the same time that the record is saved. Geography/Geometry fields are special fields supported by certain SQL databases that allow for 'location' searches--a highly useful function for many business mobile apps (e.g. find all records within 1 mile of my current location).
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About Author

Richard Rabins
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.

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