Who has Offline-Maps?

Question

Many field workers use a certain map offline. To update this map they all need to delete their offline map. But how do I know, which field worker still has an offline map, to contact her/him personally? I don't want to ask them all again and again to delete their offline map.

TamT · Answer

Thanks for your answer. Yes, it would be hard to make it happen to tell everybody to delete their offline areas. But unfortunately we have to do it as it is a bug (or we haven't realised yet how it works correctly). We tested it on two devices. Remove replicas on REST correctly removes replicas on REST. In the Field Maps App the "Offline Areas" are still visible as text, they can be accessed but not synced anymore. Our two mobile devices show a slightly different behavior:

Device 1: It is indicated as text below the map title, that Offline Areas are available. If I reload the view in the App (via finger movement from top to below on Android) the text "Offline Areas" is not visible anymore. If I click on the map, there are no offline areas. When I download another offline area, the new offline area and as well the old (!) offline area  is shown. When I collect a new feature on each offline area, only the new offline area can be synced. The old offline area (where I removed the replica) cannot be synced. So this is a big problem, as the user do not know which offline area he can use. And the user has to remove the old offline area manually!

Device 2: It is indicated as text below the map title, that Offline Areas are available. On this device the offline area are accessible. But sync is not possible (error message). It is dangerous, because if I collect a new feature the offline area cannot be synced. So there is the same problem as on device 1, as the user has to remove the offline area manually.

Although both devices have a slightly different behavior, at the end it's the same problem. The only solution that works at the moment is to inform all the users to delete all their offline areas.

Any suggestions what to do? We become quite desperate...

dougbrowning · Answer

No its not a bug the replicas and Field Maps are not live time connected.  When you try and sync the replica is gone. It is not going to go to every tablet and tell it the replica is gone.  That would be hard to make happen.

TamT · Answer

Dear Doug,

thanks for your fast and very helpful answer. Exactly what I was looking for. The only drop of bitterness is the bug... but thanks a lot for this hint, too.

Unregister all the replicas with "*" works fine: all the replicas in the REST are removed. I directly did this on the REST, where at the end of the page on  "Supported Operations" I found the possibility for "Unregister Replica".

The problem is, that the replicas are only removed in the REST, but in the field maps app of the users the offline maps are still visible. If you then do changes in such a map you're not able to synchronise back - so the collected data are loss. Do we here have kind of a bug of a bug?

Unregister Replica would be a very elegant solution without those bugs.

Any suggestions how to handle this?