Alex replied to me off list, so for the archives, here's what he said.
It's a great summary of how things work.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You first register your application with the Sync Service. At
registration you register for specific elements of the Address Book
Sync Schema. Optionally you can also register a tool (command line
app) which is called by the Sync Service from time to time, when
changes are made to the specified elements.
A sync session occurs either when triggered by the user manually, or
by either Sync Services or launchd (scheduler) calling the tool.
During each session you first negotiate a sync mode. You can either
Pull-Only, Push-Only or Push-Pull. There are a couple of parameters
which you can also set during the negotiation phase.
Once the negotiation is complete you typically push your records. At
this stage you have the option to either push all records, or only the
records which have changed. This is specified by the parameters during
the negotiation phase.
Then the sync engine will enter the "mingle" phase during which the
pushed records are merged with the truth.
After the mingle phase comes the pull phase typically, during which
the difference identified by the mingle phase is pulled from the truth.
Where you obtain the records to push or store the records pulled is
left up to you. You should however keep track of the unique identifier
for each record, at least I found it helpful. These identifiers also
get reset from time to time (client reset, disable etc) and it can be
quite a challenge to get an entire network of clients synchronised and
stable on the same identifiers.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks again, Alex.
- d
On Mar 21, 2008, at 3:10 PM, Dave Hersey wrote:
Thanks for the info. Alex. Right, the code in question uses the
Address Book framework, and all the sync logic was worked out and
has been performing well. Since this work was originally done for
10.2, Sync Services wasn't around yet. Ideally, all of the
AddressBook framework calls would go away and we would use Sync
Services instead.
So, do you make SOAP calls outside of the Sync framework to move
data to/from the server, or is there a way to set up a Sync Services
client that talks to the server directly? It's not clear to me if
Sync Services can handle the communication, if it gives you hooks to
perform that communication, or if it just works off of data that I
need to get to the local machine. Also, what is the data that you
store on the server? Is it the truth database, Address Book data or
something else... Or, do you not have to put the data on the server
because the web database is specified in the schema or something
like that, and Sync Services handles the data transfer for you?
I'm trying to understand the how the client/server communication
works. I couldn't find a good explanation of this in the docs.
Thanks,
- d
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