Sunday, July 23, 2017

MCS implementation: How to deploy your custom code with additional libraries

When implementing APIs that you have defined in Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS), you don't want to reinvent the wheel.  That is why it is important to know how to deploy other libraries with your custom code implementation.

The custom code service that you use when implementing your APIs is backed by the following libraries:

  • Node
  • Request
  • Express
  • Bluebird
  • Custom code SDK
The internal code of MCS uses these libraries. These libraries (with the exception of the '.then' construct from bluebird) are not available for you in your custom code, unless you add them to your custom code zip file. So let's look at an example I ran into during the project, using bluebird.

Adding bluebird

A lot of the Platform APIs that you call from your custom code is executed asynchronously. These methods return a so called 'promise'. A common use case is to chain the calls, using a '.then' clause. in that case you don't need to add bluebird to your project. However, in our project we needed to join multiple asynchronous calls, not just chain them.  

An example: 

var productIds = req.oracleMobile.database.getAll([table_name], {fields: 'id'}, httpOptions);
var orders  = req.oracleMobile.database.getAll([another_table_name, {fields: 'id,name, productId'});

var Promise = require('bluebird');

Promise.join(productIds, orders).then(
            function (result) {
                //your code here
            }
            function(error){
                //your error code here
            });

Since this uses not just ".then" but also ".join" you need to add the required library to your javascript file (var Promise = require('bluebird');)

According to the documentation you should add bluebird to your zip file, however in our case it worked by just adding the ('require') statement. There is no need to add the bluebird library to the zip.

Adding other libraries

In our current project a custom implementation is depending on a barcode generator library. You can add this to the custom code zip file that is uploaded to MCS. Note that these additional modules are not shared across custom code modules and you can't install a module that depends on a binary (executable file) on the server.

To use the modules in your code you have to add it to the dependency list in the package.json file and run npm install.


Note: when you download the scaffolding code, MCS automatically creates a package.json file. This contains the version "1.0". This results in an error message, because npm uses semantic versioning.
Running npm install on this code will result in the following errors:

npm WARN Invalid version: "1.0"
npm WARN sales No description
npm WARN sales No repository field.
npm WARN sales No README data
npm WARN sales No license field.

You can solve this by changing the version to 1.0.0. See for more details: http://semver.org/

In the rest of this blog, I assume you have setup the MCS custom code testing tools.
In that case you need to take the following steps to deploy the custom code with the additional libraries to MCS:

  1. Edit package.json
  2. Run npm install
  3. Test the code locally with mcs-ccc and mcs-test or postman (or cURL)
  4. Deploy the code with mcs-deploy

1. Edit Package.json 

In our case the package.json looks as follows:
{
  "name" : "sales",
  "version" : "1.0.0",
  "description" : "The API that facilitates ordering tickets based on a barcode.",
  "main" : "sales.js",
  "dependencies": {
    "bwip-js": "1.4.2"
  },
  "oracleMobile" : {
    "dependencies" : {
      "apis" : { },
      "connectors" : { }
    }
  }
}

2. Run npm install

Navigate to the root directory of your custom code API and install the npm modules you need in your project. In this case the module name is bwip-js. 
  npm install bwip-js
 npm install

3. Test the code locally

Make sure the code is working as expected before uploading it to MCS. This is described in a previous post.

4. Deploy the code to MCS

You can run the deployment as usual, from the MCS testing tools: 
mcs-deploy toolsConfig.json --verbose

Monday, July 17, 2017

Testing, packaging and deploying custom code using MCS custom code test tools

In a previous post I have described how to setup your MCS custom code test tools. In this post I will describe how to test, package and deploy your custom code using these tools. You should have installed the MCS custom code tool and updated the toolsConfig.json file with the correct url, mobile backend id and OAuth data.

Test your code

Once you have implemented your custom code, you want to test it. Of course you can test it by uploading the implementation into MCS. However, it is much better to test it locally and make sure it works, before you upload it to MCS. Since your custom code probably uses MCS platform APIs, it is convenient to use the mcs-ccc as a local 'container'. Note that when you run the test, it will call the platform APIs in your instance in MCS, so if you insert data in the database, it ends up in the cloud, even though you are running the code locally!

Components of the MCS testing tools and communication with MCS instance

You can either run the tests that are defined in the toolsConfig.json or you can run tests in Postman or cUrl.

When you want to run the test from Postman or cURL, simple point to localhost:4000 instead of the  MCS path. Don't forget that the mcs-ccc runs on http, not https.

The correct values for the port can be found in the output of the console when you start mcs-ccc in verbose mode.

Instead of running tests from Postman or cURL, you can also run tests that are automatically generated in toolsConfig.json:
  1. Run npm install
  2. Run mcs-ccc toolsConfig.json --verbose
  3. Open a separate command line
  4. Run mcs-test <path to toolsConfig.json> <testname> --verbose In this case mcs-test toolsConfig.json getProductsprices --verbose
  5. This returns the response in the command line
If you have a template parameter in your call, you have to hard code this in toolsConfig.json and run the test (you can spot these by looking for "PARAMETER").

Advantages of this approach are that the test is automatically generated. The disadvantage is that none of the results are validated. Last but not least, you have to hard code the parameters. For that reason we usually run real system tests in Postman. The testing tool can help the developer in the beginning, to make sure the code that is uploaded will run. It is more for 'smoke-testing' than for real testing of your code.

Package and deploy your code

Once you are ready to package and deploy your code to MCS, you can use mcs-deploy:

  1. Navigate to the package
  2. Run  mcs-deploy toolsConfig.json --verbose
  3. Enter the username and password when prompted
You should see the implementation in the MCS API implementation page.
sales 1.0 added as default implementation after running mcs-deploy





Sunday, July 16, 2017

Set up your MCS (development) environment: database creation policies

As mentioned in a previous post (Setup your MCS development environment: MCS custom code test tools, MCS is a cloud native platform that offers several platform APIs. One of these APIs is the database API.

It consists of two parts: 
  1. Database access. This is used by mobile applications and can only be executed from within custom code
  2. Database management. This allows you to create tables, remove tables etc. 
The first question you might ask is 'why on earth would I want to create tables in MCS, don't we have database cloud service and other sources for that?!?' 

Let me start by saying I agree with that. However, in this project we are starting with a simple API and we want to make them available as quickly as possible. The data will move (eventually) to the proper back-end system and in MCS we will use a connector to access this data that will be exposed on the Oracle Service Bus. However, at the moment the system does not contain the data and the Oracle Service Bus is not exposing services for this particular system yet. 

To save cost, minimize complexity and maximize time to market, we decided to use the database platform API. 

You can create database tables on the fly, using the Database_CreateTablesPolicy environment setting. This will cause a table or a column to be added or resized when you insert a row using custom code if it does not exist yet.

According to the documentation the following values can be used: 
  • allow: enables calls from custom code that perform implicit operations; 
  • explicitOnly: disables implicit calls from custom code;
  • implicitOnly: only implicit creation of database tables using custom code is allowed, the database management api can't be used;
  • none: curtails implicit calls from custom code.
This documentation is a bit unclear so let me elaborate on that:

ValueUse API in custom codeUse implicit calls in custom code 
allowyesyes
implicitOnlynoyes
explicitOnlyyesno
nonenono

These values are used to control the privileges for custom code, it does not control calling the database management API from outside of MCS (postman, curl etc).

There are several disadvantages to this approach:
  1. You can accidentally end up with multiple columns because of spelling errors ('address' and 'adress' for example);
  2. When unit testing custom code with 'faulty' data, instead of failing with the error you would get into your production environment (which is recommended by Oracle, to switch it off in production) you create new columns and the test fails with a different error (if it fails at all);
  3. We use the environment that we are working as a production environment. 
We decided to use "explicitOnly" and use the REST APIs to create, update and remove tables with Postman. However when I used one of the APIs I got the following response:


{
    "type": "http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.4.1",
    "status": 403,
    "title": "Forbidden",
    "detail": "403 - Forbidden",
    "o:ecid": "005L4J3QBg63j4C_nDWByZ0000x^0000yX, 0:3",
    "o:errorCode": "MOBILE-15229",
    "o:errorPath": "/mobile/system/databaseManagement/tables"
}

When creating a database table from outside the custom code (using the REST API and postman for example), you  need to call it with a user that has the role Mobile_DbMgmt. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to check your role from inside MCS, as can be seen in this picture

No easy navigation to inspect or change your role from within MCS
So, I opened a new tab and navigated to cloud.oracle.com and signed in again. This brought me to my service dashboard, and offers the opportunity to manage users, using the "users" button in the upper right hand corner.
Click users and find yourself. Check your roles and add [environment name] Mobile Database management to the roles.

Now I was able to create the table 😊.

NB: According to the documentation the default value is 'allow'. In our instance the value was set to 'explicitOnly', so make sure you check the value when you use the database platform API. 

  1. Login to MCS
  2. Click on "Administration"
  3. Scroll to the bottom of the page
  4. Click Export and save the policy file.
  5. Edit the policy (if needed)
  6. Upload policies.properties
The setting is applied instantly.

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Setup your MCS development environment: MCS custom code test tools

Oracle Mobile Cloud Service is a so called 'cloud native' product in the Oracle PaaS offering: it runs in the Oracle Public Cloud and there is no on premise variant in the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack.

In our current MCS project we have set up a number of things to make sure that we can achieve the same quality in our software development lifecycle (sdlc) as we have in our 'traditional' projects. One of the measures is the ability to run unit tests locally before deploying the code.

MCS is a cloud service that is based on node.js. It offers a number of platform APIs that you can use when creating custom APIs for mobile developers. The figure below shows these platform APIs: storage APIs to store files, Database APIs to store relational data, notifications etc. When you write a custom API, you use the platform APIs and you call connectors in the implementation.

When you use a tool like Netbeans (or any other javscript tool), these platform APIs are not available, which makes it hard to test your code without installing it on MCS.  To solve this problem, MCS offers MCS custom code test tools.

Description of intro-arch.png follows
Architecture of MCS (from the documentation)

MCS custom code test tools

It took me a while to discover the MCS testing tools, because I am a so-called 'service developer'. The testing tools are located in the SDK which is targeted at the role 'mobile app developer' who use, not build,  the custom APIs. (Hint @Oracle: please make the MCS tools available in the implementation page for the API). 

Prequisites
  • local version of node.js (6.10) and npm 
  • An account on Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS) with role 'developer'
  • An API scaffolding to test the setup
  • A development tool of choice (in this case Netbeans)

The following steps need to be taken to go through the entire lifecycle: 
  1. Download the MCS custom code test tools
  2. Install the MCS custom code test tool on your machine using npm
  3. Setup your mobile backend for testing
  4. Set the custom API up for testing
  5. Run it locally (yay!! 😊) with the MCS custom code test tools

Download the MCS custom code test tool

1. Navigate to the MCS download page.

NB: don't use the downloal link on the applications page, it will bring you to a download page, without the mcs-tools folder!!

Don't click on this link!!












2. Select any SDK (every SDK contains MCS custom code test tools), unfortunately there is no separate download for service developers and download it (hint @Oracle)
3. Extract the file to a location of choice. Navigate to the mcs-tools folder and extract this folder into the location of choice. Note that the mcs-tools folder contains the mcs-tools folder. This is the folder you need. 

SDK files


mcs-tools directory containing mcs-tools directory


Install the MCS testing tool

  1. open a terminal session and navigate to the deepest mcs-directory: mcs-tools
  2. run npm to install the tool on your machine
  3. test the installation, it my case it returns 17.2.5
cd {sdk path}/mcs-tools/mcs-tools
npm install -g
mcs-test --version

Setup your mobile backend for testing

  1. Create a new API that will act as a proxy for your local tests by adding the OracleMobileAPI.raml in the "Create API" dialog. 
  2. Add the implementation by uploading the "OracleMobileAPIImpl.zip" to the implementation of the API.
  3.   
  4. Switch off "Login required" in the security tab. 
  5. Add the API to the mobile backend. 

Setup your custom API for local testing

  1. navigate to the root folder of your local API implementation (or the scaffolding if you did not create an implementation yet)
  2. run npm install
  3. update the 'toolsConfig.json' file and enter the mobile backend id, the anonymous key and the OAuth data that are used to deploy to MCS. They can be found in the mobile backend settings page. For obvious reasons, I don't show the details here 😉

Run it locally

1. Open a terminal
2. Run the mcs-ccc with the correction options (you can also use --debug to debug in Chrome)

mcs-ccc toolsConfig.json --verbose

The result is:
C:\Users\ldikmans\Documents\api-straat\product\productapi> mcs-ccc .\toolsConfig.json
Warning: Configuration property "proxy" is undefined
To display help and examples associated with warnings, use the --verbose option

Ping OracleMobileAPI to verify that OracleMobileAPI-uri and authorization are correct.
OracleMobileAPI ping succeeded!
The Node server is listening at port 4000

The downside of this approach is that you have added a 'foreign' API to your mobile backend. You can handle this in two ways, depending on how many environments you have:
  1. Remove the OracleMobileAPI from the mobile backend as soon as you publish it
  2. Remove the OracleMobileAPI from the mobile backend in your test or production instance. 

In the next blog I will describe how you can test, package and install your custom code into MCS, using 'mcs-tools'. 

Happy coding 😊