6.0.0-git
2024-03-29
Last Modified 2006-09-07 by Guest

Horde Syncing Roadmap

Things that need to be worked on

Bugs/Limitations

  • When doing SlowSync with no phone data, the phone may never sent a <sync>. Horde only creates it output in respond to this sync so nothing is send then.
    • sometimes the synthesis clients crashes upon receiving calendar data.
    • iPaq Sync with Sync4j Connector: Kronolith all day events show up on wrong days on the PDA: An all day event in Kronolith for let's say the 19th of december 2005 has a start time of 00:00 on the 19th and ends on 00:00 on the 20th. This event ends up on the PDA with an end time of 23:59 on the 20th.
    • Nokia: one hour offsets when syncing calendar entries.

Possible Extensions

  • Allow customizations which calendars/addressbooks should be synced. Maybe allow merging of more than one data source (think of private and shared calendar) (Apple has a really cool feature for multiple calendars in a palm device: Each category in the palm is one subscribed calendar in iCal. Maybe a feature like this would be great to have overlayed/group calendards)
    • Proper conflict resolution. current policy is: client wins. (As the client send it changes first.)
    • Aligning Client and Server categories (work started on that. Currently visible only for P800/P900)
    • Fancy features like 'delete old entries from client calendar/todo list' etc. to save space on client.
    • Palm: Mapping all-day events to a time range (e.g. 8am-23pm). I think palm does not know/handle an all-day event flag and therefore the icalendar/calendar data is modifed when resynced. (Committed a patch to this)

Code Cleanup

This sections lists stuff that does not directly affects functionality but rather the quality of the code

  • create meaningful phpdoc source code documentation
    • better error handling (SyncML): currently no real error handling is in place.

Other stuff:

Testing Suite

The SyncML Conformance Test Suite can be downloaded from sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/oma-scts/

SyncMLConformanceTestSuite shows which test we currently pass or fail.

Debugging info

Once the current code makes it to CVS people should give it a try and check if it works. If not, the xml in /tmp/sync/, the horde log and the php error log should be helpful. If you can provide a patch to make it work: great!

Otherwise mail the offending xml and/or logs to the list. I'll have a look at it.

As many phones/pdas/whater should be thrown at the code. I'm especially interested to see the <devinf> device information section that the phones sends in its initial packet. This gets stored in /tmp/sync/syncml_client_0.xml when you start with an empty /tmp/sync/ dir.

Make sure to modify the <cred>...</cred> part in the SyncML header if it exists. It contains your username and password.

I'll try to come up with a brief "how to help with debugging" and add it to the installation docs. Otherwise we might get lots of "just installed the horde rpm and SyncML doesn't work with my XXYY phone! pls hlp!!!! I'm new to linux!!!!!" messages :-)

Data Issues

Another area where I expect problems are the various implementations of the text/x-vcalendar,vcard,... formats flying around. Basically something like


BEGIN:VNOTE

VERSION:1.1

BODY: Here's a quick note

END:VNOTE

SyncML itself doesn't understand these things: it just passes them around between the phone and the external horde api "as they come".

If you have tricky stuff like recurring events, inline photos or other exotic data in the file (or got them "treated" by Outlook), horde or your phone might quickly get a hickup. So we need to test as many of these formats as we can get our hands on.

This is more of a general horde issue than about SyncML. You can test the behaviour by trying to import/export files with this ical/vcard data into kronolith/nag/turba using their respective import/export menu entries. That should use the same codebase.

Right now as I'm writing this, I've noticed Jan creating a framework/iCalendar/tests/charset1.phpt test file. Excellent!

Timestamp and Horde API Issues

a) currently the horde api only supports listBy($action,$ts) to retrieve $actions since timestamp $ts. The SyncML protocol requires that the ending timestamp of the sync timeframe to be exchanged _before_ the actual syncing starts. So we need an additional parameter: listby($action,$ts,$ts_end)

b) the SyncML works as follows:

1) the clients sends its changes to the server

2) the server sends its changes to the client.

so when in step 2), the horde api is called with a request like "give me all changes in horde since the last sync", you get the changes induced by the client in step 1) as well. You have to somehow "tag" them to avoid echoing (and thus duplicatinging) them back to the client. Simply storing the guids in the session is not sufficient: the changes are made _after_ the end timestamp (see a)) of the current sync so you'll dupe them in the next sync. My current implementation deals with this as follows: directly after a client induced change is done in horde, state.php's gettsforAction is called to find out the biggest=latest ts for the given guid. If the horde api would provide me with this info directly (maybe just store it in a static var and provide a getLastTS() method in Driver), that would be great and eliminate costly and redundant DataTree calls. Similar in listBy where you get a list of guids but still need to retrieve the latest History timestamps for these guids manually using the DataTree so you can check out if the changes are a result of a client request or not. If listBy would return an assoc array $guid->ts that would help a lot (and solve a) as well).

Testing Suite

Nobody has access to all the SyncML clients all the time. So there's a always the risk that you supply a fancy enhancement patch that works fine for you but breaks down everything for everyone else. So it would be great to have a "testing suite" (in JUNIT terms) which simulates sync runs for all supported phones. (Maybe done by sending specifically crafted XML files based on the logging data of various phones and checking the results). Before a commit of a new patch a test run is done with this suite to ensure it doesn't break things up. Just an idea (dream) for now, suggestions how this could be done are welcome.