Automatic synchronization with iCloud

Brendan,

how about autosync when opening or closing Tapforms? That way we probably allways stay in sync. (off course the button stays for immediate sync) :-)

Hi Michael,

Understood. I would love to have full auto-sync too. I understand the limitations of the current implementation. I know it’s definitely an area ripe for improvement. It should “just work” without all the hassles.

iCal (aka Calendar) works the way it does because it’s not really iCloud sync you’re dealing with, even though it’s under the umbrella of iCloud. Your device is talking to a CalDAV server which handles specific information about calendars and appointments. Plus there’s very little information being synced and they have server processes which can handle conflict resolution, etc.

Tap Forms uses “Documents & Data” from the iCloud suite of services. There’s no logic on the server that I can implement that can handle things like baselining a bunch of syncs into a single file to reduce the number of sync files lying around and such.

There’s also no third party website integration available to offer an iCloud web based version of Tap Forms.

Thanks!

Brendan

Notes uses a different technology for syncing. It’s not iCloud Drive. Pages and Numbers use iCloud Drive, but they’re document based apps and not database type apps. Their documents actually live in iCloud, so when you save a document, it saves directly to iCloud Drive. That gets synced to your other devices. There’s no form of database transactions that are occurring in those apps. Because Tap Forms uses SQLite to store all its data, the only way to sync is to keep a local copy of the database on each device and then manage transmitting just the changes up to iCloud. Then on the other side the changes need to be merged with the local copy of the database taking into consideration changes that may have been made there, deletions, additions, etc.

I wish it were a simple matter of just copying a single file up to iCloud as is the case with many other apps, such as 2Do and others.

Tap Forms also does not use CoreData for the database access layer. It uses FMDB which accesses the SQLite database directly. CoreData offers a sync solution that provides transaction log base syncing built-in. I built Tap Forms way before Apple even provided CoreData on iOS, so it wasn’t an option for me to use that technology. And by the time CoreData came out, it was too late for me to use it as Tap Forms was already built upon direct SQLite commands.

So this is a really complex problem for me. I’ve been constantly thinking about ways to accomplish WiFi syncing and that’s also very complex. There are a lot of things that iCloud Drive gives me for free which I will now have to do myself with WiFi syncing. For example, when I store files in your Mobile Documents folder, I don’t worry about what files are on other devices or if files have been synced already or not. I just write files to disk. iCloud Drive determines what files need to be sent to the other devices for me. It also handles the actual transport of the files. When I do WiFi sync, I have to handle all of that myself. Finding out what files are different between all the devices, sending over only the files that are new or have changed. Deleting files that no longer exist on the source or target device, etc. Plus not to mention physically transmitting over all the sync files back and forth to process.

Thanks,

Brendan