---

Introduction to Sync Services Tutorial

Contents:

Who Should Read This Document?
Organization of This Document
See Also

Syncrospector is a development tool used to help debug your Sync Services applications. Sync Services is a framework containing all the components you need to sync your applications and devices. By using Sync Services, user data can be synced with other applications and devices on the same computer, or other computers over the network via .Mac.

For many reasons, designing, implementing, and debugging your syncing application can be challenging—for example, multiple applications may join a sync session, your application may crash, your local data file may be missing when your application launches, and you might want to trickle sync. This tutorial focuses on the responsibilities of the application and introduces an invaluable debugging tool.

This tutorial uses two example applications, SimpleStickies and FancyStickies, to show you how to debug your applications and implement additional features. The sample code, called StickiesExample, is available on the ADC Reference Library in:

• ADC Home > Reference Library > Documentation > Apple Applications > iSync

Who Should Read This Document?

You should read this document if you are developing an application that uses Sync Services. This document contains information on developer tools and techniques for debugging your Sync Services application.

Organization of This Document

The following articles cover several aspects of developing a Sync Services application:

• “Using Syncrospector to Debug Your Application” explains how to set up the Syncrospector tool and view status about clients, the truth database, and sync sessions.

• “Viewing Sync Session Results” describes how to view the call history of a sync session.

• “Syncing Multiple Applications” describes how to view the call history of two clients that join the same sync session.

• “Trickle Syncing” describes how to implement trickle syncing.

• “Refresh Syncing” describes how to modify a client to refresh sync when local records have been inadvertently removed.

See Also

For a complete description of the Sync Services API, read:

• Sync Services Programming Guide discusses Sync Services concepts such as the architecture, components, creating a schema, and managing a sync session.

• Sync Services Framework Reference contains a description of each class, method and type.

If you are using or extending an Apple Applications schema, such as contacts, bookmarks or calendars, read:

• Apple Applications Schema Reference describes the different Apple Applications schemas that you can use in your applications.

The /Developer/Examples/Sync Services folder contains more in-depth sample code.

---