[RESOLVED] Disconnected Data sollution ideas pls

[FishGuy]

hi all just looking to see if anyone can point me in the right direction with this one.

One of our sales guys comes in to the office once a week and asks me to print him a report off, all the report has is a list of his cleints and their current status. I was thinking what if I made it so he could just get that data on his laptop when he comes in and update his list then he can print the reports at home as much as he wants.

Whats the best way of doing this.

[Phill64]

master database on your system and a slave database on his laptop.

your master database will have a table which remembers what date and time him (and any others) last sync'd their database. Assuming your records are dated you can then perform a query to send any records changed after that date to his database.

Or else copy&paste the entire database (icky if it's big and heavily used)

that's the way i would go about it anyway, that or set him up a webpage.

[FishGuy]

Hm a slave database on the lappy, what would that be then, I cant see a full version of SQL Server being installed on the machine are there any possibilities with XML?

[Phill64]

XML would be possible, perhaps a normal MS Access database would be easier?

depending on what the data is(eg: 1 table) you may even consider a text file

[maged]

i would go for using the std diconnected architecture of ADO.net,
a dataadapter that reads the data from the server at first, populate a datatset with all it's tables,relations and constraints (like the dbase). then write it on XML file for offline usage (save xml file on laptop). - the dataset has two methods (readxml & writexml).

in offline mode the system can read the disconnected data, write to it , modify, delete.

and at the end of the day i will use the dataadapter to update the dATASET i read from the xml along with modifications back to the sqlserver (when the labtop is connected again).

the only drawback for this system is that you must plan your scenarios well before usage because there is a very high probability of concurrency problems regarding that labtops reads the data once in the start of the day and stay disconnected all the day long. The original data on the server may be changed by anyone for anyreasons and the labtop will know nothing about these changes because it's disconnected. so you must implement a locking or preserving technique to prevent such type of bad Issues