/d (David Derosiers) writes > If we begin to use XML as an input and output mechanism, we gain the > abliity to do "atomicity" for synchronization. This means one step above > what Palm does on their desktop and some other conduits do currently without > a lot of local conduit work. We can now make changes on a per-field basis, > instead of a per-record basis. (You change the phone number on your Palm in > the Address Book entry for John Doe, and on your desktop, you change the fax > number for the same user. With atomicity we (hopefully) can merge these two > items into one "corrected" record which is sync'd back to each location > properly).
I'm intrested as to how you'ld see this happening ? Does the Palm store details of which fields have changed over and above the simple setting of the "dirty" flag on a modified record ? My playing around with XML storage (I think I have the mail "reader" working now by the way) can store the Palm's dirty flag as an attribute at the record level (as in Norm Walsh's DTD). Is there other info on the Palm you can access above this level ? Whilst I can see how a DESKTOP app might allow for the setting of a dirty flag as an attribute at the "field" level, in the case you describe above, how would you know (flag) which field had changed on the Palm ? Unless you keep a clean copy of the last-sync'd (clean) record, as well as the Desktop changes, you have no way to tell what has changed (rather, compute the sum of the changes). Consider the case where you change the same piece of info (field) on both the Desktop app and the Palm but the changes which are made are not the same. Dont you need the equivalent of transaction logs on both sides of the conduit to work out the complete set of changes ? So, I guess my underlying question is: is there any other info that can be used to identify records and/or changes to them in the way you suggest: maybe I missed something ? Kevin -- Regards, ---------------------------------------------------------------------- * Kevin M. Buckley e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * * * * Systems Administrator * * Computer Centre * * Lancaster University Voice: +44 (0) 1524 5 93718 * * LANCASTER. LA1 4YW Fax : +44 (0) 1524 5 25113 * * England. * * * * My PC runs Linux/GNU, you still computing the Bill Gate$' way ? * ---------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Pilot-unix mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hcirisc.cs.binghamton.edu/mailman/listinfo/pilot-unix
