Research - Developing a sales app that is available offline

[rbauer]

I have a requirement to build a sales app that must be available offline. The app needs to allow the sales team to create a sales quote at a customer site. They may or may not have internet access. I was originally going to build a windows forms application, but then uncovered information about HTML5 Offline Mode. I'm thinking this is a very viable option, but not sure how to handle the database (or not). When online the app should use the database on the server, but when offline it should use the local copy (or xml or disconnected recordset, or ?). I could either manually keep the 2 in sync or use something like Microsoft Sync Framework.

I'm looking for any input you can give as I'm just starting this project. I think this is going to be a fun and cool project with room to learn a ton.

Thanks,

Randy

[JAB Creations]

Greetings Randy,

There was the Web SQL Database however Firefox and IE don't support it and apparently the spec has been sitting around untouched for some time. You could try using Web Storage which works as far back as IE8 for legacy browser support. There is also the Indexed Database API though it's implementation is moderately limited compared to web storage at the moment.

[rbauer]

Yeah, I've been looking at a couple of localStorage options, but it seems that they are going to have limitations for space. Since I'm just getting started, I'm not sure how much data I'm going to have to store locally. The sales force is going to need pricing for everything then then the quotes they are working on.

I'm thinking I may have to write a winform app for the laptops and then a webapp for those who are always connected. The winform will be a dumbed down version of the webapp.

Thanks