Azure Mobile Service as your App's backend

In continuation to the two previous blogs (Parse and Firebase), in this one describing Azure Mobile Services. It's an another option for cloud based back end that's quick to get started. Microsoft Azure is a sophisticated cloud service provider with great pricing options.

In this blog, focus is on server side code. I'm picking JavaScript back end (NodeJS) for Azure Mobile Service, which will be configured to use MongoDB for data storage.

If you are looking for JavaScript code consuming the Mobile Service use my earlier blog. It's using SQL Azure and a table for storage.

Let's get started. Log into Microsoft Azure Management portal.

Using MongoLab for our Mobile Service

Let's use Mongo Lab for the database integrating with Mobile Service. It provides MongoDb as a service on the cloud. Checkout more here.
This is also available on Azure Market Place, which we will use in this sample.

1. Click New, Select Market Place. 
2. Find and select MongoLab
3. Click next and select your plan. I'm choosing Sandbox, which is free for the purposes of this blog.
4. Click next, review and complete the purchase.

Once done select Mongo service in the Portal. Click Connection Info. Copy the connection string.

Working with Azure Mobile Service

Select the Mobile Service we wanted to work with. Make sure it's JavaScript back end. Dot net back end services have slightly different options.

Setup Source Control and clone to your machine.

Setup Source Control by clicking Setup Source Control in dashboard tab. This is required to be able to add MongoDb NPM Package to the Mobile Service back end.

Next navigate to Configure tab, copy git Url.

(Note: You always have a git URL at this place. I had to find it hard way, unless Setup Source Control is done, git URL doesn't work. I was hoping it will work with Microsoft/Azure credentials, but it has it's own user id and password)

1. In any folder on your machine, use git clone << git URL >>
2. Use npm install mongodb
3. Commit and push your changes.
• git add --all
• git commit -m "Added MongoDB Package"
• git push

Now the Mobile Service is ready for MongoDB Code.

Modify the mobile service to integrate MongoDB (instead of tables)

In the Mobile Service, select Data tab and resource you want to work with. In this example resource is named Book.

Next select Script tab. Here we can select Insert, Update, Read and Delete from the drop down. The script for each operation has one line by default request.execute(), which performs respective action to the SQL table. We can add additional server side validations if we wish to.

For using Mongo DB we are going to modify the script to update Mongo DB instead of SQL Table. Below are basic scripts to do so. You might improvise on these to make it more sophisticated.

Note: if you leave request.execute() it will also perform operation to the table. One interesting idea would be to go to Mongo for specific kind of data and use table for the rest.

C . R . U . D

In the data tab and selected resource (table) use drop down to switch between C.R.U.D (Create/Insert, Retrieve/Read, Update and Delete) and write code to read/insert/update/delete from MongoDB.

client.connect takes connection string, which was copied from MongoLab Market Place service earlier in the blog.

Note- Mobile service uses Patch instead of put for update

In conclusion Azure Mobile Services are flexible to use with multiple data storage options other than the default tables and yet it's quick to get started with many out-of-box features. There are many other Mobile Services' features like Push notifications, Scheduled Jobs etc. I hope to hack more of it soon.

Happy Coding.