Tip of the Month (January 2008)

Allowing Multiple Handhelds to Synchronize to the Same Table

Visual CE allows you to synchronize the same desktop/server table to multiple handhelds. The easiest way to enable this is to just say YES when you are asked if you want to keep the table synchronized with more than one handheld when you first download a table (FILE | DOWNLOAD TABLE). But what if you change your mind after the fact or you create the table using Visual CE's FILE | CREATE TABLE? Is it still possible to set this up? Yes, you can turn on multi-handheld synchronization at any time.

First, open up Visual CE on the desktop and select FILE | SYNCHRONIZE. Double click on the name of the table on the right hand side. You will see a checkbox labeled "Multiple handhelds synchronizing to the same table". If this checkbox is "on", then there is no need to do anything else (you are already set up for multiple handhelds to be synchronized to the same desktop table).

Otherwise, turn on the checkmark and click OK. Click CLOSE to close the synchronization dialog, but leave Visual CE running.

Open your desktop/server table and set the OID for all the records to either 0 or null ("blank"). Close the database.

Then, back in Visual CE, select FILE | SYNCHRONIZE and press the GO button. You need to do this to give Visual CE a chance to initialize all the internal structures it needs to do this multi-handheld synchronization.

And that's it, you're done. You can then sychronize multiple handhelds to the same desktop table. This will work regardless of whether you are synchronizing by selecting Visual CE's FILE | SYNCHRONIZE | GO, by putting the hanheld into the cradle, or using mEnable.