Storing data

veganrun

I'm working on a Windows phone app and the app will be searching for various pieces of data. I thought about putting all this data into a database or XML file and shipping it with the app, however the data itself it likely to change reasonably often so the file with the app would automatically be out of date any time the data changes. And I don't want to be pushing out app updates every few days or whatever to just update the data.

So this leaves me thinking I need some sort of Azure/cloud database that I can query for this information.

Is this my only option or is there some other/better way to tackle this? The data will be live and has the potential to change often.

Thanks.

deconduo

veganrun wrote: »

I'm working on a Windows phone app and the app will be searching for various pieces of data. I thought about putting all this data into a database or XML file and shipping it with the app, however the data itself it likely to change reasonably often so the file with the app would automatically be out of date any time the data changes. And I don't want to be pushing out app updates every few days or whatever to just update the data.

So this leaves me thinking I need some sort of Azure/cloud database that I can query for this information.

Is this my only option or is there some other/better way to tackle this? The data will be live and has the potential to change often.

Thanks.

Can you not have the app itself do the data collection, and store the results as a local file?

veganrun

deconduo wrote: »

Can you not have the app itself do the data collection, and store the results as a local file?

That's an option but it would have to crawl different websites and the data wouldn't always be formatted how I need, plus if the site(s) change, it would break the app/crawling. It seems better to have all the info stored in one location and query that.

amen

Why not have a central server that the app can call once a day (or what ever interval you want) and get the latest data ?

veganrun

amen wrote: »

Why not have a central server that the app can call once a day (or what ever interval you want) and get the latest data ?

This might be an option. How would I create a central server? Is there some online service I could use?

Colonel Panic

You answered your own question! You could use Azure or any host or means you can think of to make the data available to your app. It could check online periodically and update it's local date store.

veganrun

Thanks, I got the thing working in the end with an Azure database.