Hello everyone.
I know I said we would do a project manager application next and we will soon. I have received my Surface Pro 4 and I thought it would be better to do a lesson on developing an app for the tablet. I already have an order from a customer who provides field service to their customers and wants an app for their field tech’s which will easily interface with their office app. There original application was written in Alpha Software version 4 and has been upgraded over the years to version 10. They have stated they are not interested in upgrading to Alpha Anywhere at this time and are looking for another solution. They are updating their hardware to new systems running Windows 10 and have ordered Surface Pro tablets for the field techs.
Since the app I am writing for them is proprietary, I will not discuss their application. Instead, we will design an application which will be for managing assets such as gems, coins, crystals etc.. This app will have a desktop module as well as a tablet module which can be used for cataloging, recording and taking pictures of collectibles at shops or trade shows. It will then sync with the desktop making the data instantly available. I think it will be fun and the frame work we develop here will be universally applicable to other apps which use the surface pro 4 tablet as their mobile device.
When you design a desktop app, the tendency is to make it feature rich and take advantage of graphics, memory and storage. A mobile app typically does one specific thing and does it easily and very well. In order for the two apps to work together, there must be a way to share data. Alpha Anywhere is designed to work on any device and shares data by using data grids to view and manage data stored in tables on the web or desktop. Is there another solution?
What do you do if you don’t have Alpha Anywhere but still want to develop a mobile app that shares data with the desktop app? Answer, Use OneDrive.
Microsoft gives each licensed owner of Windows10 15 GIG’s of free cloud storage and OneDrive uses the cloud to share data between all your Windows devices. As a test, I created a table on my desktop placed it under my OneDrive folder. Next I opened the table and entered a record, saved and closed the table. Then I went to my laptop which I disconnected from my network, opened my OneDrive folder and there was my table. I opened it and edited the original record and added a new record saved and closed. Finally I left home with my Surface Pro 4, went to the Starbucks down the street and turned on my tablet. Pointed to the OneDrive folder and there was my table. I opened it and both the edited original record and the new record added from the laptop were there. I added a final record from my tablet, went home and all records were in the original table I created. No data grid no upload function no FTP protocol; it just worked.
Now that we know we can share tables stored under the OneDrive folder, we must decide how to use them. I have two thoughts on that. First is to do like I did above and allow all devices to share the drive and add records as needed. This will work but lets say one person is on the street and another is at the office. Both are entering records. If you have a key value in the table which must be unique then a field rule will handle the entry with no problem unless the user on the street has no signal; then both users could generate the same value in the key value field and once the mobile device is resynced, you would get and error on the field rule. To overcome this, you could use my second thought which is to use the mobile table as a clearing house of data. The mobile user enters all data into the mobile device as needed and then uses a trigger event to sync the data to the desktop. Once the sync is complete, the mobile device will clear the table.
I think this is actually the better solution. This allows the desktop app to work independent of the mobile device and it only collects data from the shared table when the trigger event calls for a data operation such as append or post etc.. This is the procedure I will start with. As always, if it does not work as intended, I can and will change course.
Well that’s it for today’s lesson. Next we will start the design process with the desktop app, creating our tables, a set and designing our first form. I should have it up soon. Until then, I would like to say thanks again for stopping by and remember, if you need help with an Alpha Software application or wish to inquire about a custom application for your business go to our website
and inquire or contact
NLawson@cdc-TakeCharge.com
Have a great day.
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