Offline Apps - Coventions and Known Issues

Conventions and Known Issues

Conventions

Every module of an offline app must contain a login screen named Login. The OfflineApps component is hardcoded to redirect users to the Login screen of the current eSpace, whenever their session expired.

An OfflineForm's inputs must be named according to the convention Entity_Attribute in order for their values to be saved to the database. E.g. User_Name, Contact_PhoneNumber

Know Issues

ConvertJsonToRecordList, ConvertRecordListToJson and CreateSampleRecord actions only work with Record Lists. They don't work with the List type, which was added with Outsystems Platform 9.

Using server side redirects (Destination widgets inside the Preparation of a screen, with a screen as the target) and links/buttons with Submit method may cause screens to become cached with another screen's name. If this happens the user will need to clear the browser's cache.
In order to work around this issue AJAX Submits should be used, instead of Submits; redirects in Preparations should always target an External Site widget.

DetectConnection's connectionUp event is often triggered incorrectly when a page loads.

Form fields must have a name that follows the Entity_Attribute convention. Entity and attribute names can't contain underscores.

Limitations

OfflineApps is only fully suppported on the latest versions of Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 10, Internet Explorer 11 and Safari.

OfflineApps uses the browser's indexedDB, webSQL or localStorage to store offline data. Each of these storage methods has different size limits, these limits differ by browser and they are poorly documented. This study seems to be the best compilation of information on this topic.

Entities with non integer identifiers aren't supported.

OfflineApps should work on the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, but there's some quirky behavior after a manifest update and detecting the connection status, so it is recommended that you use another browser.

It isn't possible to generate a manifest using Firefox if your app contains external stylesheets.