Issues with offline mode and reload

[joaopiopedreira]

Hi davidwoody,

First of all, thank you for this precious resource you're creating here.

I have an Meteor-Cordova running on android (iOS coming soon) in production for 1 month now and I'm experiencing some issues related with connectivity. It uses GroundDB + appcache + reload-on-resume.

When the users experience connectivity problems (slow network, 3G...), and only in some cases, the app starts reloading over and over, not letting them do their job.

I'd like to debug/simulate this behaviour, but have no clue how to do it. If you have some experience of this, could you point in the right direction?

Many thanks,

Joao

[jimthedev]

@joaopiopedreira Did you every figure out how to work around this? I am interested in offline and meteor but this sounds like a bad experience if unaddressed.

[davidwoody]

@joaopiopedreira @jimthedev I apologize for being incredibly late to answering this question, it just now re-surfaced.

I am guessing your issue has to do with hot-code push. When the app does not have connectivity to the server, it will fall back to using the code installed on the device. If this code gets out of sync with the code shipped from the server, and there are connectivity issues, I could see how there could be a loop of falling back to old code and trying to update to new code delivered from hot-code push when a connection is reestablished.

I recommend trying to keep your server and app store code as closely synced as possible. Hot code push should really only be relied upon for small bug fixes.

As far as replicating this issue and testing it out locally, that will likely be very difficult as simulating intermittent network and out-of-sync client code (with hot code push) would be pretty tricky.

For testing offline functionality, I recommending doing testing where you turn off the local meteor server and testing behavior of what happens when it comes back online.

Under the hood, GroundDB is using local storage, which can have some limitations as far as data size is concerned so make sure you're really conservative when it comes to subscribing to data you need to keep offline. Another issue to watch out for with GroundDB is data syncing conflict resolution. I know they're working on this, but it's still something to watch out for.