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AppsDB

Legacy Process

The information here applies only for Showpad Apps v1 (deprecated). While your existing v1 Showpad Apps will continue to work, we strongly recommend:

AppsDB is a key / value store that allows you to enrich your Showpad App with the following key features:

  • Offline Storage
  • Cross Platform
  • Data Protection

You can access the AppsDB by leveraging the Experience App SDK during the development phase.

AppsDB concepts​

While AppsDB is used after you've completed developing your Showpad App, it's a good idea to start getting familiar with some important concepts.

Store​

A store is the top-level object which groups multiple store entries together. A store must be registered before it can be used. This is done by using a POST request to the store endpoint.

Store entry​

A store entry is the actual object that holds your data. A store entry is identified by an ID and holds a string as value. Each store entry sits in a Store and has an associated scope.

Scope​

A scope is the permission boundary from which an entry is accessible. Currently, there are two scopes. USER and GLOBAL.

User Scope​

When an entry is created in the USER scope that entry is associated with the Showpad user that has created that entry. This means that each user can have its own set of entries within the same store, without colliding with entries from another user. Even though user entries are scoped to a single user it's possible to retrieve all store entries cross-user by using the store entries call. Note that this call requires an additional OAuth2 scope appsdb_online_integrations which can be set to your OAuth2 client or by creating a personal access token.

tip

You can retrieve all cross-user Store entries by using a store entry call.

Global Scope​

Entries created within the GLOBAL scope can be retrieved by all users but can only be created when the requester has the "appsdbonlineintegrations" OAuth2 Scope.

Pagination​

AppsDB uses cursor-based pagination with an optional limit. When retrieving a large list of user or global scoped entries, we limit the number of entries returned (see API documentation). Whenever one of these limits is hit, we return a cursor-string that can be passed to a subsequent request to receive the next page of entries. When no cursor is returned all entries have been retrieved.

Data Storage​

When offline use cases matter for the Showpad App integrating with AppsDB, we recommend that you store data that will not change in one store entry or as few possible store entries.