User-management with Backendless.com

I’ve seen a post or two asking about end-user management so I’ll offer up my own simple(-ish) app to do end-user creation and login with the Backendless MBaaS platform.

(start of sales pitch) The app uses https://backendless.com/, which offers a free account that starts with decent quotas on storage, API usage, pub/sub, push notifications, and even a few media streams. As your needs grow, you can purchase “function packs” to expand only those features that you need. Everything is backed by a straightforward REST API which is very easy to integrate with Thunkable. (end of sales pitch)

Grab the AIA file here …

The main screen is mostly a set of links to other pages that do the “real work”. But it also includes a TinyDB that stores some of the authentication info needed by Backendless – more on this later since you’ll need to fill in the “Application ID” and “Secret Key” with your own values.

The basic flow of the app is that you go to the “New User” creation page (RegisterScreen) and enter a name, email, and password … click “Register” and the app contacts Backendless to create the account. That doesn’t actually log you in; you need to go to LoginScreen to do that. The login process will return a “user-token” that is needed for future API calls (and is stored in the same TinyDB). Now that you’re authenticated, you can run a simple database query to view information – the “Run Command” button links to the RunScreen which should show the user-token and let you query the first or last item in a dummy database.

I’ll skip the “creating the app” stuff for Thunkable since it’s all in the AIA file.

On the Backendless side, you need to create a new “App” – this is just a container for a set of data, users, roles, media, files, etc. Once that is created, look on the left-side menu for the “Manage” tab, then “App Settings” … you should see your “Application ID” and “REST Secret Key” (copy and paste those into the Screen1.Initialize code).

Now, go to the “Users” tab, “User Properties” and make sure “Enable Dynamic User Definition” is enabled. Under “Users”, “Registration”, also make sure the “Registration” slider is enabled. You’ll see that there are also options to require email verification and to set default time-outs for sessions.

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(hit “create” too soon)

Here is the AIA file … BackendlessUserMgt.aia (13.3 KB)

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Sounds cool. I will definitely take a look.

Very interesting!! I’ll take a look too!!

PUT URL changed.
https://api.backendless.com/{{Application ID}}/{{REST API Key}}/log
instead of
https://api.backendless.com/v1/log

But messages and timestamp seems to be ditched and only name is kept for the first log entry. So switching screens back and forth results in only ONE log entry. Or I missed something.

Useless without further tests.