4D for iOS: Go fully offline

Nowadays, mobile users expect apps to work even when they’re offline. Otherwise, a poor network connection can give a poor user experience. Offline mode is no longer just an extra feature you can choose to add to your app, it’s something many users expect, especially for delivery apps with GPS navigation, apps for urgent medical assistance, construction businesses, and banking apps.

As you may already know, since v17 R2, 4D for iOS already allows users of the application to view data offline. But something was missing.

What about offline tasks?

In 4D for iOS, you can now work offline and interact with your 4D server in a very flexible way.

When no network is available or when the server is not reachable, your tasks are put in a queue, waiting for the server to be available. This guarantees you a very smooth and efficient way of working, with apps that constantly work without any delays.

Benefits

All your business rules are executed and validated from the 4D server side. That’s why this mechanism is the most efficient way to deal with offline actions.

In summary, to avoid having a different local version of the master database that may lead to conflicts, offline tasks are queued and sent to the server to be processed and validated. This means that all the mobile app data is based on the same master database.

How it lookS in the generated application

From the Settings screen, List, and Detail forms, you can access your pending tasks. All your pending tasks are available and still editable as long as the network is not available.

The direct benefit of those offline tasks is that you can reopen pending tasks to modify or delete them if they haven’t been sent to the 4D server.

Then, when the network becomes available, all your pending tasks are executed in chronologically relevant order.

You can also keep an eye on the last offline actions that have been executed, with nice feedback.

Don’t hesitate to give us feedback on the 4D forum, and check out the documentation for more details!