Disconnected Application

  • Thread starter Thread starter Eric Johanson
  • Start date Start date
E

Eric Johanson

Hi

I have a problem where users mainly use an intranet
application for certain tasks but also want be able to run
the same application when out of the office and entirely
disconnected (ie standalone) and then upload the data to
the intranet on return to the office.

My initial thought was I could create a common back end
and both an ASP.NET GUI and a Win32 GUI only this seems
expensive and redundant.

Another thought is to just create a Win32 app that can
connect to either a local ot network database however,
this removes all the joy of web applications and ease of
updates & deployment etc.

Finally I believe I could create a java applet that can
run either in a browser or standalone but not sure how as
I have no java experience and would much rather use .NET

I guess I either need to be able to run an ASP.NET app
locally without too much overhead (eg a full IIS install)
or be able to get a Win32 app to automatically update
itself when updates are available?

Can anyone help with my options here?

Cheers

Eric
 
If the users can use IIS on there machines I should use
that solution and serializing and deserializing Datasets
as Data source in the offline mode. Then update the
database as fast they are in online mode.

This is a tricky solution. But I think Datasets are the
best datasource in this case, because you can easily
maintain this data, update etc.

Is this the aswer you wanted? if not then mail me if you
wanna talk more about this. (e-mail address removed)

JN
 
I have a commercial application that does this, and works
wery well.

My solution was to write a Web service that provides a
secure interface to the database, and which reads/writes
datasets. Then I wrote a Win32 app that connects to the web
service.

I wrote a briefcase class that is a wrapper around a
dataset, and allows the data to be switched on/off line,
either reading and writing XML files to the users profile
folder, or reading/writing to the web service.

In this way the code on the forms does not need to be aware
of the briefcase issues.

I also allow the user to selectively offline subsets of the
database, and the briefcase class has an IsAvailable method
that returns a boolean, so the UI can change the options
accordingly - ie if the parts table is not offline in
offline mode, then an edit box is presented instead of a
combo box.
 
Hi Martin

Glad to hear someone else has faced this before. Your
solution sounds ideal my only question concerns updates.
Rolling out software to potentially ~100 users is a real
pain and also very time consuming. I appreciate you've
solved this to some extent by using a Web Service to keep
some of the functionality centrally located but how do you
manage the release of a new version eg to fix some bugs or
to add a new field?

Eric
 
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