Salesforce Mobile SDK and Ionic – Remote Hybrid App - Update without Rebuilding

Brett M. Nelson - Wednesday, November 29, 2017

One of the reason to build a Remote Hybrid app is so that you can make changes to it without having to rebuild and resubmit it to a store. Since the main view is a Visualforce page we can make changes to it in Salesforce and see them instantly in our app.

Update the Visualforce

Since our app is now a working website with some portions saved in the device and some portions coming from Salesforce we could update a portion of the app, or even the whole app, without interrupting a user. Just edit the Visualforce :)

In our case we may want to update the Home screen since we don't want it saying Ionic Menu Starter any more. Problem is it's the holiday season and we want to make sure our app is working properly without waiting for it to go through any review process delays.

Old Home Screen

Instead we want it to say something like WIPDeveloper.com Contacts App and nothing else.

So in the home/home.html I'm going to change the <h3> to WIPDeveloper.com Contacts App and remove everything else in the content.

Updated `home/home.html`

Home

WIPDeveloper.com Contacts App

Save it and run npm run build. This will generate new main.js and main.js.map files. Lets create a StaticResource and put these updated files in in. I'm going to call mine ContactsApp and save it to Salesforce.

Now on our Visualforce page let's update it to use the main.js file from our static resource.