Serving Data to the Apple Watch with IBM MobileFirst

This is the third entry in my series on powering Apple Watch apps using IBM MobileFirst. In the first post I covered setting up the project, remote logging, and analytics. In the second post I covered bidirectional communication between the WatchKit extension and host app (not really MobileFirst, but still applicable). In this post we’ll examine how to consume data from the MobileFirst Foundation Server inside of an Apple Watch app.

If you’re already familiar with consuming data using MobileFirst Adapters, then guess what… it is *exactly* the same as consuming an Adapter in a native iOS project. Since the logic for a WatchKit app is executed in the WatchKit extension, which is actually an executable that runs on the phone, there is no difference between between the two.

If you aren’t familiar with Adapters, they are server-side code that is used to transfer and retrieve information from back-end systems to client applications and cloud services. You can write them in either Java or JavaScript, they can be consumed in any MobileFirst app, and they offer security, data transformation, and reporting metrics out of the box.

In the video below I walk through the process of recreating the Apple Watch Stocks app using data delivered from a MobileFirst Platform Foundation server instance. The data is simulated, so don’t use it for any investments. 🙂

The basic process was this: build out the Apple Watch apps user interface in Xcode/Interface Builder, build the adapters to expose the data, then start consuming the data within the WatchKit extension to deliver it to the watch app interface.

Full source code for this project is available at: https://github.com/triceam/MobileFirst-WatchKit/tree/master/Stocks

The User Interface

So, lets first look at the app interface. I have two views that were built in Interface Builder. One is a table that displays rows of data, one is a details screen which has lots of labels used to display data.

In the main interface I have a “loading…” label (that is hidden once the data is loaded) and a table that is used to display data. For each row in the table there are 3 labels to display specific data fields. These were connected to IBOutlet references in the view controller class. All of these are straightforward WatchKit development practices. Be sure to check out the WKInterfaceTable class reference for more detail on working with WatchKit tables.

For displaying the details screen, I also used very similar pattern. I added labels for displaying data, and linked them to IBOutlet references in my view controller so I can change their values once the data is loaded.

Serving Data

Loading data into a WatchKit extension is identical to making a request to the MobileFirst server adapter from a native iOS app. I did use my helper class so I can use code blocks instead of the delegate patter, but the implementation is exactly the same.

So, here’s how we can create an adapter using the MobileFirst Command Line Interface. Use the “mfp add adapter” command and follow the prompts:

[bash]$ mfp add adapter
[?] What do you want to name your MobileFirst Adapter? StocksAdapter
[?] What type of adapter would you like?
Cast Iron
HTTP
Java
JMS
SAP JCo
SAP Netweaver Gateway
❯ SQL
[?] Create procedures for offline JSONStore? No
A new sql Adapter was added at /Users/andrewtrice/Documents/dev/MobileFirst-Stocks/server/MFStocks/adapters/StocksAdapter[/bash]

Adapters can be used to easily connect back end systems to mobile clients. You can quickly and easily expose data from a relational database, or even consume data from http endpoints and easily serialize it into a more compact mobile-friendly format. You should definitely read more about MobileFirst adapters through the platform documentation for more detail.

What’s also great about the MobileFirst platform is that you get operational analytics for all adapters out of the box, with no additional configuration. You can see the number of requests, data payload sizes, response times, devices/platforms used to consumes, and much more. Plus, you can also remotely access client log messages from the mobile devices. Take a look at the screenshots below for just a sample (these are from my dev instance on my laptop):

All of the data I am displaying is simulated. I’m not actively pulling from a relational database or live service. However, you could use a very similar method to connect to a live data repository.

I exposed two pretty basic procedures on the MobileFirst server: getList – which returns a stripped down list of data, and getDetail – which returns complete data for a stock symbol:

[js]function getList() {

simulateData();

var items = [];
var trimmedProperties = ["symbol","price","change"];

for (var i=0; i<data.length; i++) {
var item = {};
for (var j in trimmedProperties) {
var prop = trimmedProperties[j];
item[prop] = data[i][prop];
}
items.push(item);
}

return {
"stocks":items
};
}

function getDetail(symbol) {

for (var i=0; i<data.length; i++) {
if (data[i].symbol == symbol) {
return data[i];
}
}
return null;
}[/js]

Once these are deployed to the server using the CLI “mfp bd” command, you can invoke the adapter procedures from a client application, regardless of whether it is native iOS, native Android, or hybrid application.

Consuming the Data

OK, now we’re back to the native iOS project. In either Objective-C or Swift you can invoke an adapter directly using the WLResourceRequest or invokeProcedure mechanisms. In my sample I used a helper class to wrap invokeProcedure to support code blocks, so I can define the response/failure handlers directly inline in my code. So, in my code, I invoke the adapters like so:

[objc]-(void) getList:(void (^)(NSArray*))callback{

WLProcedureInvocationData *invocationData =
[[WLProcedureInvocationData alloc]
initWithAdapterName:@"StockAdapter"
procedureName:@"getList"];

[WLClientHelper invokeProcedure:invocationData successCallback:^(WLResponse *successResponse) {

NSArray *responseData = [[successResponse responseJSON] objectForKey:@"stocks"];
//do something with the response data

} errorCallback:^(WLFailResponse *errorResponse) {

//you should do better error handling than this
}];
}[/objc]

Once you have the data within the WatchKit extension, we can use it to update the user interface.

For the data table implementation, you simply need to set the number of rows, and then loop over the data to set values for each row based on the WKInterfaceTable specification.

[objc][self.dataTable setNumberOfRows:[self.stocks count] withRowType:@"stockTableRow"];

for (NSInteger i = 0; i < self.dataTable.numberOfRows; i++) {

StockTableRow* row = [self.dataTable rowControllerAtIndex:i];
NSDictionary* item = [self.stocks objectAtIndex:i];

[row.stockLabel setText:[item valueForKey:@"symbol"]];

NSNumber *price = [item valueForKey:@"price"];
NSNumber *change = [item valueForKey:@"change"];
[row.priceLabel setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%-.2f", [price floatValue]]];
[row.changeLabel setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%-.2f", [change floatValue]]];

if ([change floatValue] > 0.0) {
[row.changeLabel setTextColor: [UIColor greenColor]];
[row.containerGroup setBackgroundColor:[UIColor colorWithRed:0 green:0.2 blue:0 alpha:1]];
} else if ([change floatValue] < 0.0) {
[row.changeLabel setTextColor: [UIColor redColor]];
[row.containerGroup setBackgroundColor:[UIColor colorWithRed:0.2 green:0 blue:0 alpha:1]];
}
else {
[row.changeLabel setTextColor: [UIColor whiteColor]];
[row.containerGroup setBackgroundColor:[UIColor colorWithRed:0.15 green:0.15 blue:0.15 alpha:1]];
}
}[/objc]

For the detail screen we’re also doing things even more straightforward. When the screen is initialized, we request detail data from the server. Once we receive that data, we’re simply assigning label values based upon the data that was returned.

[objc][self.nameLabel setText:[stockData objectForKey:@"name"]];

NSNumber *change = [stockData objectForKey:@"change"];
NSNumber *price = [stockData objectForKey:@"price"];
NSNumber *high = [stockData objectForKey:@"high"];
NSNumber *low = [stockData objectForKey:@"low"];
NSNumber *high52 = [stockData objectForKey:@"high52"];
NSNumber *low52 = [stockData objectForKey:@"low52"];
NSNumber *open = [stockData objectForKey:@"open"];
NSNumber *eps = [stockData objectForKey:@"eps"];

float percentChange = [change floatValue]/[price floatValue];

[self.priceLabel setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%-.2f", [price floatValue]]];
[self.changeLabel setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%.02f (%.02f%%)", [change floatValue], percentChange]];

if ([change floatValue] > 0.0) {
[self.changeLabel setTextColor: [UIColor greenColor]];
} else if ([change floatValue] < 0.0) {
[self.changeLabel setTextColor: [UIColor redColor]];
}
else {
[self.changeLabel setTextColor: [UIColor whiteColor]];
}

//update change with percentage

[self.highLabel setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%-.2f", [high floatValue]]];
[self.lowLabel setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%-.2f", [low floatValue]]];
[self.high52Label setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%-.2f", [high52 floatValue]]];
[self.low52Label setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%-.2f", [low52 floatValue]]];

[self.openLabel setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%-.2f", [open floatValue]]];
[self.epsLabel setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%-.2f", [eps floatValue]]];
[self.volLabel setText:[stockData objectForKey:@"shares"]];[/objc]

What next?

Ready to get started? Just download the free MobileFirst Platform Server Developer Edition, and get started.

Complete source code for this project is available on my github account at: https://github.com/triceam/MobileFirst-WatchKit/tree/master/Stocks

Series on Apple WatchKit Apps powered by IBM MobileFirst:

Enjoy!