Tag Archives: mobile

Recently we had to build a mobile application and one of the requirements was to implement a corporate authentication for managing the user accounts. We think the approach that we used could be interesting and helpful in similar scenarios that is why we would like the share our experience.

The app that we built is simple and allows pulling and displaying some corporate information for authenticated users. Following are some details about the technologies that we used to build the app:

• Ionic – We used the Ionic framework to build the mobile app itself. Ionic is a great framework for building hybrid mobile apps. It is based on AngularJS and provides handful components and tools. The apps build with Ionic are easily distributed to iOS and Android devices.
• ASP.NET Web API – We used the ASP.NET Web API 2.2 to build the server part. It pulls the data from the database and sends it to the mobile app in JSON format by implementing a RESTFul API. It also handles the authentication part by implementing part of the OAuth 2.0 protocol.
• Okta – Okta is a third-party authentication provider and our client had already been using it for managing their Active Directory accounts.

In short, the mobile app sends the credentials to the API server which is responsible to validate them by communicating with Okta. Once the credentials are validated then it generates a token which is stored on the mobile device and used for further communication between the mobile app and the API server.
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