Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms

By : Ed Snider
Book Image

Mastering Xamarin.Forms

By: Ed Snider

Overview of this book

Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. Starting with an app built with the basics of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, we’ll go step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. We’ll start by introducing a core separation between the app’s user interface and the app’s business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data binding. Discover how to extend and build upon the components of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit to develop an effective, robust mobile app architecture. Starting with an app built with the basics of the Xamarin.Forms toolkit, we’ll go step by step through several advanced topics to create a solution architecture rich with the benefits of good design patterns and best practices. We’ll start by introducing a core separation between the app’s user interface and the app’s business logic by applying the MVVM pattern and data binding. Then we will focus on building out a layer of plugin-like services that handle platform-specific utilities such as navigation, geo-location, and the camera, as well as how to use these services with inversion of control and dependency injection. Next we’ll connect the app to a live web-based API and set up offline synchronization. Then, we’ll dive into testing the app—both the app logic through unit tests and the user interface using Xamarin’s UITest framework. Finally, we’ll integrate Xamarin Insights for monitoring usage and bugs to gain a proactive edge on app quality.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Adding identity and authentication to Azure Mobile Apps


In the previous chapter, we set up a new, live backend service hosted in Microsoft Azure. The service contains a single table, Entry, which houses all log entries for our TripLog app. Currently, the Entry table is available anonymously. In this section, we are going to change the permissions on the Entry table to require each request to contain an access token associated with an authenticated user.

Setting up permissions

In order to enforce authentication to access our backend service, we need to make a simple configuration change to the Entry table.

  1. Select your TripLog Mobile App in the Azure portal.

  2. Click Settings.

  3. Click Easy Tables in the MOBILE section of the Settings pane and then select the Entry table, as shown in the following screenshot:

  4. Click the Change permission button, as shown in the following screenshot:

  5. Change each of the table permissions to Authenticated access only. Then, click the Save button at the top of the pane.

Now...