[sync-services-developers] Slow or Refresh Sync?

[Brian M. Criscuolo]

Here's something I'm trying to get straight and would love some  
input, if anyone has experience with this.

I'm synchronizing multiple handhelds, using the Contacts data type. I  
synchronize handheld A, all is good. I synchronize handheld B and  
expect that all of my data from HH B is merged with everything else  
and I end up with the same data after the synchronization. That's  
been my experience with other sync schemes.

In this case, however, HH B is slow synchronizing. From what I can  
tell, when I push all records from HH B into the truth it flags  
anything in the truth that is NOT in the set of records being pushed  
as deletes. An example probably better describes it:

- Sync with HH A, 10 contacts. Address Book ends up with records  
named 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
- Slow sync with HH B, which has 10 different records, named  
11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20
- After sync, Address Book ends up with records named  
11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20 - the other set appears to have been  
deleted.

Is this how slow sync in Sync Services works? Not by merging  
everything, but by basing the "correct" set of data off of what the  
client is pushing?

Would I want to refresh sync each time I synchronized a different  
handheld, or is the overhead of that way too high and inappropriate  
for this case?

Maybe I really don't want to slow sync at all - I just want to fast  
sync with my client at all times, and only push changes from handheld  
B into the truth.

Thoughts would be appreciated!

b


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