Skip to content

Bundling Apps

After you have created, edited, or validated your Mobile Development Kit app, you must bundle the app metadata to be interpreted correctly by the Mobile Development Kit client app at runtime.

Note

If your client retrieved metadata via mobile services App Update, use the deploy option to deploy your application.

Output of the bundling process is intended to either copy to an existing local client or generate the UploadBundle.zip for manual deployment to mobile services. These options (MDK: Bundle to App root, MDK: Create Upload Bundle Zip) are configured in the User Settings. If neither of the option is specified, the resulting bundle will be created in temp folder.

Note

App Root can alternately be specified in the Launch.json.

Procedure

  1. Launch Visual Studio Code and open an Mobile Development Kit application folder or a Git repository folder containing multiple Mobile Development Kit applications.

  2. Bundling process gets triggered automatically every time a change is saved.

    Note

    If auto-bundling is enabled, you can turn it off by choosing Code Preferences Settings and deselecting the MDK: Auto Bundle option in the User Settings window.

    You can manually trigger the bundling process at any time on any Mobile Development Kit file.

    • Select Terminal > Run Build Task.
    • Select the Mobile Development Kit Bundle Build with the name that matches your base application's name and path.

    Note

    Triggering the bundle process enables validation of the app by default. If there are errors during the validation, you can see them in the TERMINAL or PROBLEMS view.

    You can turn off this default metadata validation behavior by selecting Code > Preferences > Settings and marking "mdk.validateBeforeBundle": false in the User Settings window.

    Note

    By default, the bundling process doesn’t stop even if there are errors found during the metadata validation.

    You can change this behavior by choosing Code > Preferences > Settings and deselecting MDK: Stop Bundle On Validation Error option in the User Settings window.

Results

Your metadata has now been bundled and copied to the Mobile Development Kit client.

Debugging App with Visual Studio Code Debugger

Last update: November 18, 2022