Offline Applications Overview

Offline support enables client applications to access back end data without requiring a connection to the back end.

Note Does not apply to Agentry applications.

You might want to run applications offline to:

Improve performance by accessing offline data instead of sending data requests to SAP Mobile Platform Server.
Enable users to continue to use applications when there is intermittent network coverage.
Support business processes that must be executed by a user while the application is offline.

To work offline, an application must initialize an offline store, which stores data that the application can access when it is offline. SAP Mobile Platform Server provides an Offline OData Service that moves data between the back end and the client offline store.

The server retrieves data from an OData producer that is running in a back end and creates the inital database on the client. If the back end does not have an OData producer, the server uses Integration Gateway to convert other types of datasources to OData. The server updates the client database based on deltas with the back end. Deltas between the back-end data and the client data are computed by the back end or by the server.

You can configure offline applications to optimize offline performance by defining:

Column indexes for the client database
Common user data to cache on the server to reduce the amount of data that needs to be synchronized with the back end.

When an application is offline, it accesses data from the offline store. Any updates that are made while the client is offline are stored locally and become pending updates for the back end. When the client comes back online, SAP Mobile Platform Server updates the back end by processing the pending updates.