From what i've been able to discern so far, Firebase/Firestore seem like the perfect platform to use for an app I am writing. However I can't quite connect all the dots when trying to design my backend. I am hoping that someone will be able to give answer a couple of basic questions about the use of FB/FS.
With my app, a user will be able to share a small piece of data with a select group of friends. ie if the data is to be a To-Do list, the user would create the list on his device (iphone only) and then invite a small group of friends (probably less than 10) to share that data. The friends would have read-only access by default, however, the user can assign any number of them to be "admins" which would allow them read/write permission. When any changes occur to the data, all "friends" who have access to the data will be notified (by some means - push notifications etc). They can manually sync or setup the app to automatically sync. It seems like FB/FS can be used for this right out of the box. However there are a couple of concepts that I can't get my head around.
The database I setup is accessible by ALL users of my app by default. It's not clear (at least to me) how I would set it up so when a user creates (in this case) a to-do list and invites 5 friends, only those 5 friends can access or even know about that data. This is main stumbling block in my development path.
Regarding invitations. I read in the FB/FS documentation that invitations and notifications are among the many features available. I'm not clear on how this will work if a) the recipient doesn't have my app installed and b) how the inviter would get feedback when the invitation was accepted or declined.
Any guidance that anyone is willing to share to help me get started will be a huge help and will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
You can create new privates collections inside the main collection, and set different rules for access.
Check at: Firebase Firestore get private fields
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I'm trying to develop a trivia app, much like Quiz Up but with multi players.
Here's what I thought of doing:-
Creating a class called 'Game Session' on Parse, that has information of who created it (PFUser.current), the name of the gaming session(name), and the names of users invited(invited_users). Think of this Gaming Session as a closed group where the users interact with each other only.
So there's a createSessionViewController, and a joinSessionViewController.
If User A creates a gaming session (in createSessionViewController) and sends invites out to User B and User C, they get to accept or decline these invites in joinSessionViewController.
Now from what I have researched is that I would have to query through all the objects in the class Game Session (in viewdidload of the joinSessionViewController) and use query.wherekey for eg, User B's object id is in the column "invited_users". If so, I return that Gaming Session's object. Is that right?
If that is the case, is that an efficient way of doing it? Because it seems like if the app gets popular and there are lots of objects in the class, then it could take up a lot of time to get the one object with User B's id.
I hope I made myself clear and you guys understand my question.
PS: I'm sort of new to parse and swift, so if you could give me detailed answers it would be much appreciated.
Your logic is correct but I would also strongly suggest you take a look at Parse-LiveQuery. This tool allows you to subscribe to a PFQuery you are interested in. Once subscribed, the server will notify clients whenever a PFObject that matches the PFQuery is created or updated, in real-time.
https://github.com/ParsePlatform/parse-server/wiki/Parse-LiveQuery
https://github.com/ParsePlatform/ParseLiveQuery-iOS-OSX
Your assumption is correct and that is indeed one way you could go about doing that although it has drawbacks as you mentioned. If you felt like putting more effort into it, you can write JavaScript parse cloud code that executes after an item is saved (for example after a game session is created) and send out silent push notifications with the new objects id to the users who were invited. You could then use that push notification data to know the exact ids instead of having to query for them. This is much more advanced though. For whatever your app is, the simple route of having a model query the data on load should be fine. If you find yourself in a situation where performance is hindered due to this, well then congratulations.
I currently work at a school and have an idea to create an app that allows students to contact a grown up (for example, the principle) anonymously through an app. The app would quite simply consist of a contact form. I am trying to find out the best, and easiest way to achieve this without setting up servers with a separate API. Does anyone have a suggestion on how to achieve it? Is there any way to set up an e-mail form with a pre set recipient and a built in sender-account? Please guide me in the right direction.
You would need to implement an SMTP client. You can use open source code like skpsmtpmessage
It's likely that their example app could be your solution.
Your biggest problem will be the deployment. You definitely need to pay an $99/y developer account and add all the students device ID's to your account (with a maximum of 100 devices/y) or register all of them as beta tester (I don't know the limitations).
Probably this isn't doable so easily, as it seems you don't have iOS developing experience so far. Maybe you can find something on the app store that works with self hosted databases. But you definitely need to host some kind of webApp/API.
You may want to give Appygram a try to handle the back-end if you are able to set up the contact form itself. While it's a separate hosted API, at least you don't have to build/manage it.
Appygram is a free web service that would allow you to configure all the details such as which adults could be contacted, their point(s) of contact (i.e. email address), and it would process and send all the submissions for you. All your app needs to do is send a form post request.
A nice thing about having this information outside of the iOS app itself is that you can change the contact details on the fly without requiring an update to the iOS app itself. Whether you use Appygram (which, since I contribute to it, I am slightly biased toward!) or something similar, I would say that since this is for students, I would recommend a solution that would allow you to update your configuration without requiring app updates.
Finally, I'd second what Julian said. The challenge here could be with deployment. One possible alternative would be to make this a mobile-friendly web page accessible only via student login or on the school network (or both). Would probably be easier development-wise and wouldn't require installs nor the hurdles that Julian described with device registration, etc. And, Appygram would still work with this setup as well.
Good luck!
In the Simperium documentation/help section there is the following text:
All the data that is created seems like it must be tied to a user - is
that correct? Is it possible to have data that isn't tied to a user -
say a database of locations or beers?
Yes, though this isn't very clear yet. You can create a public user
(i.e., a public namespace) with an access token you share with other
users of your app so anyone can read/write to that namespace.
It's possible to limit this to read-only access as well if you need to
authoritatively publish data from a backend service.
Is there an actual example with this?
The scenario I have is as follows
My app will have a calendar
The primary user can add and remove data from the calendar
They will want to invite other users to add and remove data, my thought is that they can give them a token, the user can use their email address and this token to sign in
Am I on the right track?
You're definitely on the right track, but a little too far ahead on that track. The scenario you described is a great fit for Simperium, but sharing and collaboration features aren't yet released.
The help text you quoted is for authoritatively pushing content, for example from a custom backend to all users of your app. An example of this would be a news stream that updates on all clients as new content is added.
This is quite different than sharing calendar data among a group of users who have different access permissions, which is actually a better use of Simperium's strengths. We have a solution for this that we've tested internally, but we're using what we've learned to build a better version of it that will be more scalable for production use.
There's no timeline for this yet, but you'll see it announced on your dashboard at simperium.com.
I have a site for a hobby im working on that has restaurant reviews on it. I want users to be able to add new restaurants in as well as edit the info on other restaurants which they may or may have not added to the site. I am not sure what the best way to approach this is. I have a few options I have thought of, but I'm not sure.
Only allow restaurants that are on say google places
main concern with this approach is if a restaurant a user wants to go to isn't listed on google places then what
Allow users to manually add in restaurants and check google places and fill in pertinent info like address phone if not on google places then let user add all info in manually... if is or is'nt on google places still have to manually accept restaurant to the site
the main downside of this is I may have to spend tons of time making sure a restaurant is real or isn't real
Anyone have any ideas?
also i am running rails should i just use a versioning gem to achieve the request an update so that way i can moderate updates or new restaurants...
I am no Ruby guy, so I will not comment on that part. But depending on the size of your user base I would solve it by user moderation or do it manually. If you haven't got that many users moderating the new entries should be feasible and if you got many users it should be possible to accept any new entry and then allow users to flag bad entries like it is done here on SO or on foursquare or Facebook Places.
Of course you could choose to accept anything available on Google Places, but only allowing entries that can be found there would make it annoying for users to enter new info which would discourage them from doing so.
I need to develop an application which should help me in getting all the status,messages from different servers like Twitter,facebook etc in my application and also when i post a message it should gets updated in all the services. I am using authlogic for authentication. Can anyone suggest me what gems/plug-ins i can use..
I need API help to get all the tweets/messages to be displayed in my application and also ways to post the messages to the corresponding services by posting it from my application. Can anyone help me from design point.
Walk through what you'd want to do in your head. Imagine the working site, imagine your webapp working before you start. So your user logs in (handled by authlogic) and sees a textbox called "What are you doing right now?". The user fills in a status message and clicks "post". The status message appears at the top of their previously posted messages.
Start with the easy part. Create a class that posts to two services. Use the twitter gem and rfacebook to post to two already defined services. In the future, you'll want to let the user associate services to their account and you would iterate through the associated services and post the message to each. Once you have this working, you can refactor or polish the UI a bit to round out this feature. I personally would do the "add a social media account to my profile" feature towards the end.
Harder is the reading of the data (strangely enough) because you're going to have to figure out how to store it. You could store nothing but I suspect you'd run into API limits just searching all the time (could design around this). I would keep a little cache of posts associated to the user's social media account. In this way, the data model would look like this:
A user has many social media accounts.
A social media account has many posts. (cache)
Of course, now you need to schedule the caching of the posts. This could be done manually, based on an event (like when they login) or time based. So when the update happens, you load up the posts for that social media account and the user will see the posts the next time they hit the page. For real-time push to the client's browser while they stare at the screen, use faye (non-trivial) and ajax to pull the new posts to the top of the social media stream view.
The time based one is tricky because you'd either have to have a cron job run or have rails handle it all with a gem like clockwork. But then you have to leave rails running. I've also solved this by having a class in /lib do all the work and a simple web call kicks off the update. But it wasn't in a multi-user use case. So that might not work. In any case, you'll want to have some nice reusable code for these problems since update requests can come from many different sources.
You'll also have to deal with the API limits. When pulling down content from twitter, you won't get everything. That will just have to be known by the user or you'll have to indicate a "break in time" somehow.
The UI should be pretty easy (functionally anyway), because you know which source the post/content is coming from. It'd be easy to throw a little icon next to the post to display which social media site it's coming from.
Anyway, good luck, sounds like a fun project.