Hi,
I'm hoping some of you developers, MVPs, and evangelists can help me come up with a design plan and possible samples for something I would like to try.
This area of Delphi is totally new to me as I have been purely working in a desktop UI to internal network DB environment for a long time. This unfortunately means everyone else I work with has too and I have no internal knowledge-base with which to draw upon. With the release of Delphi 10 Seattle, I thought it was about time I did some of my own ideas as well to compliment the business, especially with all the new tools available to me. Work only ever purchased the professional version of Delphi as it was enough for the business, so I forked out my own hard earned cash for an enterprise version.
So, as to what I would like to do! I'm interested firstly in doing something pretty basic at the start to be honest, and then build from there. What I want is the ability of
- User logs in using AD authentication (ideally encrypted)
- Querying a set of data from my internal SQL server which would be of the format ID (int), Title (Str), Value (Float)
- Display it on a mobile app.
- The user can select a single record and display a little more information on the record via another query
- A button for the user to press to pass back a request to "Approve" the record
There is a lot more I would like to do, but I think that gives me the basics to build upon.
As to what I have available, I have an, external to my network, IIS server and SQL server, so I was thinking I could build a Datasnap server and eventually install it here. This then gives any mobile app a place to "talk to". This also gives me a place to store data if I need to.
The biggest issue is, you can't talk from outside our network to inside, for security reasons. Everything is 1 way traffic, the internal network can read and write to the external SQL server, but the external server cannot go the other way.
The only way I can think of getting this to work is for the datasnap server to store any incoming requests from a mobile app on the external SQL server, and write a separate application which sits inside the network polling the table and processing them. The datasnap server polls the same table until it sees a response written to the table and passes it back to the mobile application. All communication just as JSON messages?
That's about it I hope, I can't really think of anything else to put down right now.
Any suggestions on general design, AD authentication, sample code etc, would be more than greatly appreciated
Mike