CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi folks, we are starting to design with one of our customers the development of an Ipad app for their Face 2 Face team. This app will replace the paper forms that their F2F canvassers use to signup new donors.

The app should be able to work "Offline" without internet connection and then, somehow, synch the gathered info with CiviCRM.

We are analyzing the development of a native (objective-c) ipad app or working with some framework like phonegap or appcelerator

Anyone with a similar requirement?

Ideas / advices are very very welcome

Alejandro

Hi Owen, it will be mostly for regular donors. Also, the Canvassers will have to log in in the app and they will also be contacts (individual/canvassers) in CiviCRM so the F2F manager can have some stats about the F2F team.

phonegap would allow to use it on android too.

Another approach might be an html offline http://diveintohtml5.info/offline.html

with localstorage and sync when you go online.

We have just finsihed an inspection report app for a housing organisation.
The app is a html5 app and optimized for use on a tablet. The inspector uses this app when he inspects a house, after the tenant has ended the rental agreement. He fills in what the tenant has to do, and what the housing organisation is going to do. Usually the tenant has to remove the carpet etc, and the housing organisation will replace the kitchen (if needed).
After finishing the inspection the report is closed and send back to civi.

The reason for using a webapp (html5) is that the server where this webapp runs on has a fixed IP-address and this IP-address could be used to make a connection through the firewall to Civi.
Also it was easier for us to make a html5 app because that is what we mostly do, so we already have common knowledge on this technique. And also a html5 webapp is device independent and probably works on future devices as well. So the users can choose their own device to work with. (e.g. a large tablet, a small tablet, a smartphone, iPad, iPad mini).

Basically my advice would be it depends on are you restricted to a device (Android/iOs/Windows)? What knowledge does the developer have? Does he have extended knowledge of building native apps? And do you oversee the consequence of deciding for e.g. objective c meaning that you are restricted to an iPad?
Those are some kind of considerations you have to take.

The app is developed and used in a productive environment since January 2015. We used Appcelerator framework to build the App and we can compile it into a native IOS or Android App.
The App synchronizes with CiviCRM for updating some information (Canvassers, Venues, Values in custom fields, etc...) and sending the completed forms.

Hope this information is useful somehow.