topic Re: Sync entire folder of documents in Alfresco Archive

Sync entire folder of documents

sem — Tue, 14 May 2013 08:01:58 GMT

Hi. Would be excellent to sync an entire folder to the Android or iOS App. Right now you need to manually favourite individual files. Could it not be an option on the mobile app to multi select files and apply a bulk favourite?mark

Re: Sync entire folder of documents

mikeh — Tue, 14 May 2013 08:38:43 GMT

Hi

Thanks for your suggestion. We did very carefully consider allowing folder sync, but were concerned about the performance impact on the Repository if many people are querying for changed files at the same time without native, core support for a file sync service to lighten the load. There are also some "user experience" issues we were never really happy with - for example if one of your users opts to sync from Company Home and then wonders why their device has no storage left!

We are always interested in making improvements to the mobile apps so we'll go back and reconsider this feature.

Thanks,
Mike

Re: Sync entire folder of documents

fernon — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:33:09 GMT

I'm also really interested in this option.
I understand your way of thinking, but can't you make an option for the end user?
Let them decided if they want to synchronise file by file, or an whole folder.

Sometimes projects can hold up many files, syncing them all manually isn't really an option that way.
Making it sync like for example Desktop sync would really be an improvement.

But thanks for looking in allready.

Re: Sync entire folder of documents

mikeh — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:08:23 GMT

It's not really the UI that's the problem - it's detecting file-by-file whether each sync'ed resource has been updated on the device, the server, or perhaps both before initiating a set of uploads and/or downloads depending on which has the newer versions. It's not really a problem for smaller repositories, but when implementing such a feature we must be mindful that some of Alfresco's customers host millions of documents and so scalability is a high priority.

We do have some ideas for future developments to make sync'ing a nicer experience though.

Re: Sync entire folder of documents

sem — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:13:16 GMT

Hi Mike - thanks for the reply. I agree that it's "difficult" when users can do something like sync the entire home. Users eh??

Hopefully a warning to the user when selecting an option would be enough?

mark

Re: Sync entire folder of documents

marc_dubresson — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:54:00 GMT

I would also add that the open source version of our app has already been modified to perform different types of sync. See here: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/iaetna-ecm/id565093572?mt=8

Re: Sync entire folder of documents

sem — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:22:07 GMT

Thanks. Sounds good. How far behind is the Android app? We did some tests on a Galaxy Note yesterday and it seemed a bit of a ball ache to get documents created in Polaris over to the alfresco repository.