When developing your cloud connected mobile app, you can't take for granted that user will be connected all the time. Supporting offline mode is crucial. Obviously, you need to consider what happen when back online. Let's talk about synchronisation.
Back online: Mobile Sync
User stores data locally on device for offline support. User pushes its data when back online. Potentially, there are conflicts to be resolved. Conflict resolution is really business focus. Depending on your app, you may choose deal with conflict very basically: reject them, deal with then automatically(providing patch), propose fine grained merge popup etc...Once user's own conflicts are resolved, data reconciliation (synchronisation with other people data) can happen. But depending on your use case (how big is your changes, how much data), you have several options...
Different options for Synchronisation
Whole sale transfer: the simplest one. Client ask for reconciliation. The whole data structure is sent over the network. "Just send everything", this is great to build a prototype before moving on more complex algorithm or if there is only a short list of items/data.
Time based approach: log based. Client side and Server side, you need to track all changes. An audit log module is needed to record logs. An increasing timestamp or numeric log (be cautious with clock difference always use the same referencial to create check point) is added to each data items when changed. Client asks for reconciliation since its last reconciliation (last checkpoint).
Math Algorithm: without prior context. No prior assumption, you don't log changes. You send grouped/hashed table of your items and you compute the difference between client and server set. One algorithm can be Efficient set Reconciliation without prior context.
To be continued... Next part, I will blog in more details about the mathsync algo and its 3musket33rs implementation.
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