Palm Programming: The Developer's Guide

Chapter 12. Uploading and Downloading Data with a Conduit

Now we are going to show you how to move data back and forth from the desktop to the handheld. To do this, we need to discuss quite a few Sync Manager functions. We show you the functionality required in a conduit to support data transfers and some useful additional features as well. After we discuss these topics, we return to our walkthrough of what happens after the HotSync button gets pressed.

Next we discuss portability issues. Knowing that you are breathless with anticipation by this point, we return to the Sales application conduit. We walk through the code that handles uploading and downloading. We show how to upload the sales orders and customers from the handheld, and download the products and customers from the desktop. We also handle deleted records in the customer database.

Conduit Requirements

At a bare minimum, a conduit that handles data uploading and downloading has to do all of the following:

• Register and unregister the conduit with the Sync Manager

• Open and close databases

• Read and write records

• Deal with categories (if the application supports categories)