Problem with sync between mobile app and website

[sarah]

Hi everyone,

My band has been using Bandhelper since last October. One of our biggest needs is to have a shared calendar where our five members can put their own schedules so our manager knows when they're available for gigs.

We've encountered repeated problems with syncing the Bandhelper schedule. I think I've understood what's happening, and I'm wondering how the app / website is supposed to work. Here's the scenario:

- User A puts an event in their schedule in the Bandhelper app on their mobile phone. They then click standby on their phone and put it back in their pocket.
- User B opens their scheduler in the Bandhelper app on their mobile phone. They *don't see* User A's event - it isn't there - and so put a clashing event on the same date.

So, my question: is it the case that the Bandhelper app has to be running in the foreground on a mobile phone which is not on standby in order for it to synchronise? Only yesterday, I had the app running on my mobile with Auto-Sync activated, and put an event in my Schedule. However, I was out of mobile connection range. When I looked at my schedule on the website today, the event had not yet been added. I switched on my mobile, brought the Bandhelper app to the front, and manually clicked Sync. The event then appeared in the schedule on the website app - more than 24 hours after I'd added it on the mobile app. The datestamp on the event indicated it's only just been added to the central database now, so yesterday's sync / upload never happened until I manually clicked Sync a few minutes ago. 

Hoping you can shed some light. Schedule sync issues are causing us some real problems.

Best,

Sarah

[arlo]

BandHelper will sync automatically when you leave a page or leave the app. So if someone enters data onto a new event and then immediately locks their phone, that should sync, but personally I would go back to the Events list to make sure my data saved before leaving the app or locking the phone.

BandHelper will not sync when offline and will not sync in the background if your phone comes back online later. So if someone wants to enter data while they are offline, they would need to remember to open the app and open a project again later when they're back online. At that point all the projects in that account will sync automatically (you don't have to manually click Sync Now).

I'll consider updating it to sync uploads only while in the background. I don't think we'd want it to sync downloads while in the background because that wouldn't have much benefit and would generate extra battery use and network access.

[arlo]

In the new app version released today, if you make changes while offline and close the app, it will check in the background periodically (every four hours) for an Internet connection and upload the changes in the background when you have a connection. It will not download changes from other devices until you open the app. If it finds a sync conflict (because someone else edited the same item while you were offline) while uploading in the background, it will stop until you open the app and can respond to the conflict.