Data Synchronization and Sqlite Data Model For Multi-User Scenarios

Most consumer application are built to either run anonymously (ie not captured information about who the user is) or they are designed with a single user in mind (think the Facebook application – whilst you can log out, typically to stay logged in, even across multiple sessions of running the application). Enterprise or Line of Business applications, particularly on slate/tablet devices are often multi-tenanted with users picking up the nearest device to them, running the app, signing in and getting to work. With this in mind the real estate inspector application has been architected so far to allow for login and switching between users. However, the local caching has been to a single Sqlite database which resides in the users application data folder. If users switch Windows profile then there isn’t an issue but this doesn’t work for devices where there isn’t a notion of user specific data folders. In this case all users will access the same database, which will result in synchronization issues or users seeing data that isn’t assigned to them.

A simple solution would be to simply create a different database for each user. However, if there is data that is common across all users (Eg property types) this will be synchronized into each database. An alternatively approach is to have a common or master database which is used to synchronise data that is common across all users, then to have individual user databases that just contain the user specific data.

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