Offline Support

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed some of the issues in supporting offline functionality. We said that the biggest challenge smart client developers face is having to manage two different data stores and synchronizing the two. Moreover, we said that the key to reducing the complexity associated with implementing offline support is to identify what functionality will be supported while offline and the data associated with it, and to do so early in the design of the application as presented in the section “Identifying Locally Storable Data.”

We also discussed the Offline Application Block and the Caching Application Blocks, which are reusable blocks that can help you to implement offline facilities with your own smart client applications. Next, we covered ways to maintain data consistency. We concluded with an introduction to managing sensitive data.

In the next chapter, we’ll move on to the topic of deployment and explain the various techniques available for deploying and updating smart clients.