Azure Mobile Services for Xamarin Forms - Conflict Resolution - azure-mobile-services

Question

I'm supporting a production Xamarin Forms app with offline sync feature implemented using Azure Mobile Services.
We have a lot of production issues related to users losing data or general instability that goes away if the reinstall the app. After having a look through, I think the issues are around how the conflict resolution is handled in the app.
For every entity that tries to sync we handle MobileServicePushFailedException and then traverse through the errors returned and take action.
catch (MobileServicePushFailedException ex)
{
foreach (var error in ex.PushResult.Errors) // These are MobileServiceTableOpearationErrors
{
var status = error.Status; // HttpStatus code returned
// Take Action based on this status
// If its 409 or 412, we go in to conflict resolving and tries to decide whether the client or server version wins
}
}
The conflict resolving seems too custom to me and I'm checking to see whether there are general guidelines.
For example, we seem to be getting empty values for 'CreatedAt' & 'UpdatedAt' timestamps for local and server versions of the entities returned, which is weird.
var serverItem = error.Result;
var clientItem = error.Item;
// sometimes serverItem.UpdatedAt or clientItem.UpdatedAt is NULL. Since we use these 2 fields to determine who wins, we are stumped here
If anyone can point me to some guideline or sample code on how these conflicts should be generally handled using information from the MobileServiceTableOperationError, that will be highly appreciated

Answer 1

I came across the following code snippet from the following doc.
// Simple error/conflict handling.
if (syncErrors != null)
{
foreach (var error in syncErrors)
{
if (error.OperationKind == MobileServiceTableOperationKind.Update && error.Result != null)
{
//Update failed, reverting to server's copy.
await error.CancelAndUpdateItemAsync(error.Result);
}
else
{
// Discard local change.
await error.CancelAndDiscardItemAsync();
}
Debug.WriteLine(#"Error executing sync operation. Item: {0} ({1}). Operation discarded.",
error.TableName, error.Item["id"]);
}
}
Surfacing conflicts to the UI I found in this doc
private async Task ResolveConflict(TodoItem localItem, TodoItem serverItem)
{
//Ask user to choose the resolution between versions
MessageDialog msgDialog = new MessageDialog(
String.Format("Server Text: \"{0}\" \nLocal Text: \"{1}\"\n",
serverItem.Text, localItem.Text),
"CONFLICT DETECTED - Select a resolution:");
UICommand localBtn = new UICommand("Commit Local Text");
UICommand ServerBtn = new UICommand("Leave Server Text");
msgDialog.Commands.Add(localBtn);
msgDialog.Commands.Add(ServerBtn);
localBtn.Invoked = async (IUICommand command) =>
{
// To resolve the conflict, update the version of the item being committed. Otherwise, you will keep
// catching a MobileServicePreConditionFailedException.
localItem.Version = serverItem.Version;
// Updating recursively here just in case another change happened while the user was making a decision
UpdateToDoItem(localItem);
};
ServerBtn.Invoked = async (IUICommand command) =>
{
RefreshTodoItems();
};
await msgDialog.ShowAsync();
}
I hope this helps provide some direction. Although the Azure Mobile docs have been deprecated, the SDK hasn't changed and should still be relevant. If this doesn't help, let me know what you're using for a backend store.