Shared resources

Certain sets of records that are used throughout the system are designated as shared resources. Examples include assets, CDR application types, contacts, and parts from the part catalog.

Shared resources are identified in two ways. First, certain models under the Models node in the Mobile configuration are designated as shared resources by having the IsSharedResource attribute set to True.

Second, the shared resources are grouped in the global download settings under the Settings > Sync > Download > Groups > Group (Id=SharedResources) node in the Mobile configuration.

See Sync node.

Note: The value of the Download attribute on the node must be set to True. Downloading for other groups can be enabled or disabled, but disabling downloading for shared resources can cause unintended behavior.

Because they are used throughout the system, shared resources are treated differently from other types of records. For shared resources only, the model settings override the global settings.

For example, addresses may be set to False under the global Sync node, but you might have addresses set to True for service requests. That way you can download only the addresses that are associated with service requests, not all addresses.

Downloading shared resources to the mobile device can be a slow process. To speed it up, you can download the shared resources for a user profile to one device, then publish the shared resources to a package on the server. When other users with the same profile download shared resources, the app will download the package rather than downloading each resource from the Rest Services separately.

The initial download will still take some time, because the shared resources are downloaded from the Rest Services one at a time. But after the package is published, the shared resources can be downloaded to other devices more quickly by downloading the entire package at once.

See Publishing shared resources.