I want to fill in questionnaires/survey on mobile devices and send the answers back to a database. I am an experienced web application developer using asp.net/mvc and sql server.
I want a cross-platform mobile solution that will cope with being sometimes disconnected.
The questionnaires are relatively straightforward in that they are assigned to a surveyor and answered by the same surveyor. So no real synchronisation/conflict resolution required. If the mobile devices could rely on always being connected then I would do it all with standard forms.
So, now I'm faced with creating a solution that lets users continue to enter data while disconnected, let them navigate through the form while disconnected, then post it all back as soon as they are connected. I have been looking at knockout, amplify and backbone. Can anyone give me a heads up about where to start?
What you are looking for is an offline application. You can use the HTML5 offline API. A few frameworks will help you along the way.
knockout, amplify and backbone are great. Also look at breezejs to manage your rich data (breeze also provides offline functionality).
If you don't want to use breeze, then you have to manually hook it up in local storage and then the application comes up online, pull the data from the local storage and send it all up in one shot.
Hope that helps! Suj