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disconnected PhoneGap app with multiple UX components?

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    #16
    Re: disconnected PhoneGap app with multiple UX components?

    The point is to help Chris work on a design that will help - to do this we need to understand (which can be difficult), rather than be critical (which is easy), so Chris stay focused on my questions please.
    Pete
    Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
    Albert Einstein, (attributed)
    US (German-born) physicist (1879 - 1955)

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      #17
      Re: disconnected PhoneGap app with multiple UX components?

      No need to fight for my appreciation, guys. :)

      Thanks so much for the feedback.

      How many of these Lists are there? Also 8Mb is a big deal in design, what else is in there frames etc..
      Editable Lists:
      (1) primary loan application list has two child lists, one of which is (2) group members for group loans and the other is just for (3) uploading images (with a view toward doing that offline, though that was before I worked on another app).

      Lookup Lists:
      (4) Groups has a child list of (5) basic account info
      (6) Individuals has a child list of (7) basic account info
      (8) Loan Products are a list primarily because when a loan product is selected, it sets the loan term and amount and fee ranges, etc.
      (9) Region / Province (static list)
      (10) Region / Province / District (static list) (I'm basically storing these as a primary key; I thought through having both lists when I built it, but I'll revisit and see if there's benefit to combining them)

      Data cache for dropdowns (mostly just display and key pairs):
      (1) Employee
      (2) Client Type
      (3) Appraisal company
      (4) Loan Purpose
      (5) Status Reason
      (6) Disbursement Options
      (7) Installment frequency
      (8) Branches (just for searching the primary list)
      (9) Approval stage (just for searching the primary list)
      (10) Processing fee codes
      (11) repayment sources
      (12) Collateral uses

      It's in 9 panels, with a lot of containers and a handful of windows. All in all, the tree structure shows 574 lines.

      About 250 lines of XBasic. About 2200 lines of Javascript, most of which is used in filtering lists and handling show/hide and enable/disable of containers and fields.

      Additional Javascript validation on a good number of fields, but not on most of them.

      why doesn't each loan TYPE have it's own database?
      I agree with David that SQL's not the problem. But I'm on the same track with you, which is what started this thread. I'd love to be able to make it a bit more modular so every user isn't loading all the controls and all the data every time. And to be honest, it wasn't until a day of so ago that I actually tallied up how many controls were for each loan type. I had believed that there were a lot more "core" data points, but I'm realizing just how heavy it is for each loan type.

      Chris, I would probably opt for a SQLite solution and unbound Lists.
      I read a lot about the various list options a couple of weeks ago on the forum (for the other mobile-only app I'm playing with/learning on), and I saw some people saying to go SQLite and others saying they'd used SQLite but were now moving to the file system persisted lists. I'm not saying you're wrong and will read further on that. And between a slowly increasing comfort with JSON, not having written my own sync code, and thinking about having to do it for 135 controls, it's not a quick switch. And, again, for this application, it needs to work for web users and not just mobile users. Or at least components of it need to be used in both modes because as you note I'm now deep into it and don't want to have two versions of this monstrosity.

      If this is a banking app then I'd suggest you have money to spend. Spend it creating a native app using Swift or Flutter and use Alpha for back-end admin stuff.
      I work in international development, so this is microfinance loans for people in poverty in Africa. We don't have money to spend. But I'll keep considering the options.

      I'd worked on other projects for this internal customer/friend before, so I should have known when I started that it would grow far beyond my original expectations. It's basically stopped growing and changing at this point, which is why I feel the space to re-evaluate the structure of it.

      Thanks again for your thoughts.

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        #18
        Re: disconnected PhoneGap app with multiple UX components?

        If you feel it's stopped growing and changing at this point... then I'd have another look. The single biggest problem with apps... specifically Alpha apps... is that developers believe the app has stopped growing and changing... and continue to use the same shoe-horn fixes because they're now fighting fires.

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          #19
          Re: disconnected PhoneGap app with multiple UX components?

          What you have to do is build your app in a dynamic manner. Your app seems large enough (number of lists, fields, panels, etc.) that it's going to have memory issues in disconnected mode (especially on an IOS device), which you have already experienced apparently. This type of problem is what lead to our Dynamic Forms module, Alpha Transform, and other developers to come up with their own dynamic form builder. There are a variety of methods that can be used to make your application dynamic, but if you don't do it now your going to be stuck and very frustrated down the road.

          In terms of disconnected app performance, in our experience, there has been little advantage to using SQLite versus File System Storage. The primary problem with disconnected apps almost always comes down to memory management - within the app itself.

          You are not alone in being frustrated with these issues, but they aren't unique to Alpha Anywhere either. People pay good money to have quality disconnected applications - because they aren't easy to build.

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