Disconnected Architecture

  • Thread starter Thread starter Christopher Walls
  • Start date Start date
C

Christopher Walls

We are looking to build a system where the admin portion of the system will
be ASP.NET based residing on a central server and the field service portion
of the system will be WinForms based. The field service personal will be
running the WinForms app on their laptop to collect data. After collecting
their data the field personal will need to connect to the Internet and
synchronize with the admin server. The majority of the upload will consist
of the collected field data, but they will also occasionally upload updated
client information. They will also download updated and new client
information.



Can anyone recommend some articles or books that walk-through some
recommended approaches to dealing with synchronizing the WinForms app data
with the main application database? I would think this problem has already
been solved a couple of different ways, each with their own advantages and
disadvantages.



I have found conflicting information and am unsure of how to proceed.
Should we install the MSDE on the laptops use some SQL Server provided
replication/sync functionality? Should we instead roll-our-own and manage
the data on the client (in XML) and transfer it back/forth via web services?
I'm looking for the pros/cons of these approaches (and any other approach)



Thanks,

Chris
 
I wrote an application much like this, but we opted to have a Win32
front-end and also a ASP.NET web interface.. so basically, here's what we
did:

One central database server (SQL2K).. the ASP.NET webapp hit that per
normal..

We made a publicly-accessible Web Service. The Win32 app could either attach
to the web service, directly to the database - or use an offline file. The
KEY element and why .NET is cool, is we wrote a IDataAccess interface and
those methods inherited that interface. So that way, we could abstract HOW
we are getting the data and could actually switch methods, while the app is
up and running!! Crap, there is a Design Pattern for that but I can't think
of the name. Kind of like Class Factory - but different.

Anyhow, I'd do what you are describing in much the same way. Work with local
DataTables - and serialize everything to disk (to create an offline copy).

Let me know if you have any questions and/or I could probably send you some
pertinent chunks of code..
 
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