[sync-services-developers] Response from Apple on initializeSession dialog

[Brian M. Criscuolo]

Last week I filed a Radar bug regarding the UI that appears when  
calling initializeSession for the first time after registering a sync  
client, and I think everyone would be interested in the response, as  
this information is not documented (maybe it will be soon) and very  
useful! The bug has been closed as behaves correctly.

I hope it is useful to you.

b

*****
<rdar://4235607> Sync Services: UI that appears from  
initializeSession does not always appear.

29-Aug-2005 10:56 AM Brian Criscuolo:
Sync Services should present a UI when initializeSession is called  
for the first time after registering a client. In our testing,  
however, this is not always the case.

Our application has three Sync Services clients, each with a unique  
ID. In tests on two different systems only one of the three clients  
presented UI when the session was run. The test setups were as follows:

Test 1: Clean, freshly installed system, Address Book or iCal had  
never been launched. Installed our software and synchronized.

Test 2: Development system. Unregistered ALL clients using  
Syncrospector and restarted. Installed our software and synchronized.

In both cases, only one client presented UI but all three allowed the  
synchronization to occur.

It would be very useful to know some of the background of the rules  
and requirement that are used in determining when to present UI,  
especially for our support needs. The user is not familiar with this  
dialog (AB and iCal don't cause it to appear) and there are few  
applications that are using it at this time.

Better would be to have the behavior be consistent for all clients.

29-Aug-2005 08:00 PM Stoney Gamble:
Hi Brian,
Engineering has determined that this issue behaves as intended based  
on the following information:

The behavior is as follows:
Any third party apps / servers / devices that sync, and are not the  
first clients to sync a particular dataclass will pop the first sync  
alert.

The two assumptions are
1) we sync the apple clients before any third party clients come around
2) users aren't concerned with the first client to sync new  
dataclasses; this is meant as a protection for the user, and if  
there's no data loss that will occur with a sync, we shouldn't bother  
them.
*****

********************
Brian M. Criscuolo
Senior Software Engineer
Mark/Space, Inc.
bcriscuolo at markspace.com
<http://www.markspace.com>