Enabling online/offline versatility
Our framework is currently stringent in how to work offline: you download your sources (like in the morning), start working (deliberately offline) and your transactions are synced as soon as you are back online.
In many circumstances Flow users in service do not know whether they will have internet while working though and they work offline foregoing on many advantages of being online.
Ideally, we would have a variable available in our start variables (like DeviceId and ClientType) so that in the flows we can take different paths depending on whether the user has internet or not - analog to driving with google maps: you start online, Google recognized the connectivity is lost but keeps navigating in offline mode (so no trafffic info for example), and when you are back online you switch back to that mode
Roel Veenman
shared this idea
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Will be evaluated in Flow Connect
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Marco Kressig
commented
Currently our offline mode is loading the data set into the client and later on the actions are pushed out and synchronized when a connection is established.
Especially in Field Service, it is sometimes unclear and sometimes the technician has a connectivity and sometimes he has not. We would use the offline mode in that case to be safe. Also there are business cases, where the execution of work takes hours. But since the data sets can only be loaded before starting a flow, the new data can only be shown after the app is closed, the set reloaded and the app opened again.
It would be great if we can receive an option to refresh the offline data sets (of there is an active internet connection). For this to work, one would need to configure a refetch of the dataset, but this could be solved in the flow.
However, currently the technician needs to log out, reload the data set and open the app again which is user unfriendly. Other system (such as IFS MWO) load the data continuously if possible into the app.
