News on 4.8.1 Syncing Bug

[jgfoley]

Hi David,

I can't imagine your frustration of having to go through this excerise; Keep the faith buddy! You have an whole team of HanDBase users rooting for you, we certainly have faith in you.

Thank you for you daily post, we all appreciate your hard work.

Once you finish this task, I hope you can take a few days off to spend with the family: looking at the times of your post, it doesn't look like your having much family time this week!

Thank you again,
Jim

[Max]

...Good news about this one- was a bug that I just found and fixed, so now it seems to download large files just fine. Still lots of testing and completion to do but things are looking good! Hope to be in testing before the week is over..

Thanks for the update, Dave--not to mention the hard work! What fun, eh?

[ArGiEs]

Go Dave!

Regards,
Bob

[steviereay]

Thanks dave your a star

[dhaupert]

Hey there!

Thanks guys for all of your support. I am so humbled by the grace you've all shown me during this time and also your patience!

Here's my update for today (Wednesday the 26th of October 2011):

I am just building up a beta version to send out to our beta testing team. This version has the new communications library in place and seems to be working fine for me! I finished the uploading code for the conduit's sending (which comes differently than the form of the browser), finished support for CSV uploads using the new library, tested with several different browsers and the conduit and fixed a few bugs today. So it's almost there and it's now ready to be tested in earnest by our volunteer beta testing team!

I still have not fixed the calculated field bug but I wanted to get through this first so that the testers can work on that while I work on the other problem that I need to fix before submitting to Apple.

I can't make any promises, but I do see a light at the end of this tunnel. If all goes well we may be ready to submit by the beginning of next week. I plan on giving it my all until it's out of my hands in and in the Apple Review team's

Thanks again.

[dezicell]

I am in startup mode with a few test records and am not able to setup synching between Handbase database and the ipod touch device. I have gotten the db on the device and once was able to synch one of the tables but not the other two tables I have in the desktop. I just purchased both Handbase desktop for Ipod and a new ipod with ios5. After selecting a db in the desktop and try to go through the synch setup the program hangs and never completes. I am actually trying to synch to access tables although I have a copy in the desktop database.

I dont know if this is the same issue as you have reported or not. If so, is there a solution this month or next year. I have a deadline and if the solution is long term I will have to switch applications.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

John

[curtterp]

John,

I am not affiliated with DDH in any way, other than I have been using HanDBase almost as long as it has been out. I read Dave's post that is just before your post, and I can say that it will not be next year before its fixed. I doubt he can get it through Apple by the end of the month (Which is Monday), but it could be close.

One thing I know about Dave and Brian. They care about their customers and their product. When something happens like what just happened with iOS 5, Dave is pretty relentless on getting it fixed as soon as humanly possible (he does have to sleep a little bit each day, and spend a couple of minutes with his family ).

I think that you will be happy with HanDBase. I have a couple of databases that I started out with on Palm, moved them over to Windows Mobile, and now I have them on my Android device. His decision many years ago to have his own homegrown data file allows this type of cross platform capability with no conversions, no worries, it just works well.

[dhaupert]

I am in startup mode with a few test records and am not able to setup synching between Handbase database and the ipod touch device. I have gotten the db on the device and once was able to synch one of the tables but not the other two tables I have in the desktop. I just purchased both Handbase desktop for Ipod and a new ipod with ios5. After selecting a db in the desktop and try to go through the synch setup the program hangs and never completes. I am actually trying to synch to access tables although I have a copy in the desktop database.

I dont know if this is the same issue as you have reported or not. If so, is there a solution this month or next year. I have a deadline and if the solution is long term I will have to switch applications.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

John

As Curt so kindly said, we are committed to fixing this issue. I've been putting in all the work required to reimplement this and it's finished and being tested right now. I hope to submit it to Apple early next week if the testing doesn't turn up anything major!

So sorry for the inconvenience this has caused all of us.

[dhaupert]

Here's my status update for today.

Beta Feedback: For Mac beta users the feedback was great- all worked fine with the conduit and they remarked that it was faster as well. For Windows users, the file upload did not work. I discovered this had to do with a different HTML version being used by the conduit there from the new communication libraries. I fixed that issue today and thus a new Windows Conduit will be released to accompany this new build.

Calculated Field bug: As you may know when certain databases were opened with 4.8.1 the program would immediately crash. I discovered this to be a bug with setting a certain floating point variable within the calculation code. The variable was fine and allocated perfectly but setting it to any value would cause a crash. After spending most of the day trying to track down this elusive bug, I found a mention on someone's blog that with iOS5's SDK there is a known issue that had to do with setting this type of floating point. That confirmed it wasn't something I did, but I had to figure out what the confirmed bug was since nothing else ever turned up about it! After some further digging I learned that the new SDK faults when the variable you write is not aligned to an alignment of 4 bytes. In other words, if a structure has a 1 byte variable and then the floating value, the floating value would crash when written to. The same was true for any case but a 4 byte alignment. I was able to force the alignment of the structure to a 4 byte alignment without effecting other structures and it is now working! Hopefully Apple will address this with an SDK update but for now this bandage seems to be holding just fine. More testing is needed hence my request earlier for more databases to test with.

A new beta was sent out to testers this evening along with a new Windows conduit beta. I believe we are getting quite close on this and hope to submit it to Apple as early as Monday (Halloween!).

Thanks again for all of your support and patience!

[stentor007]

Good luck Dave. You should be very proud of this program. I've been able to manage a many thousand pt DB with it for years. I'm a bit worried now, and won't upload download unless really needed. Certainly won't make changes on the desktop. Until 2 way sync is really working safest just to make all changes on the handheld and upload to the desktop only as required. Don't lose the handheld!!!

Good coding,