What Are Application Profiles?
Application profiles in VB Studio facilitate the development of applications that consume REST services.
As you develop your web (and mobile) apps, you need access to the REST services that your app will consume when it goes into production. Given that it may not be possible or appropriate to use production instances of the service as you develop your app, you use development and test instances that provide the same APIs as the production instance of the service for the development and test phases of application development.
To make the task of changing between development, test, and production instances easier, VB Studio provides you with the ability to define application profiles in your visual application where you specify the appropriate details to use for an app when you deploy it to a development, test, or production environment. For example, basic authentication may be acceptable to use during the development of your application, but it is not recommended that you use this authentication type when you deploy your app to production. In this scenario, you can configure an application profile for development where you use the basic authentication method that is less onerous to implement. The application profile that you use to deploy the app to production uses a more secure authentication method.
Description of the illustration vb-app-profiles.png
You access application profiles from the Application Profiles tab of your visual application’s Settings page. VB Studio provides one ready-to-use application profile (Base configuration) that is the default application profile to use when you deploy web (and mobile) apps in this visual application to development, test, and production.
To create additional application profiles, click Duplicate and provide a new name (for example, Production configuration), ID, and description in the Duplicate Application Profile dialog. Having created the new profile, you can make it the default to use when you deploy your visual app by selecting the appropriate option from the menu that appears to the right of the newly created application profile:
Description of the illustration vbs-app-profiles-prod-config.png
The application profiles that you create can be associated with the various servers (dev, test, and prod) used by the REST service that your app consumes.
In the following example, a backend that returns contact information (contactsBackend) lists three servers that host the relevant REST service. The development server uses the base configuration application profile while the test and production servers use the corresponding application profiles.
