Offline database access under Silverlight-3

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Offline database access under Silverlight-3

As the Silverlight team worked through the betas, one glaring pain point that is existing in the realm of Silverlight 3 is the ability to have an offline database, so that you can right-click on the SL application, install it locally, and then be able to manipulate data in a local setting, without the Internet.

I've read a few articles where items such as Google Gears with SQLite had been used, but so far, no one has come up with a decent method by which someone can do the same thing with a SQL CE database.

I'm theorizing, and wanted to gain feedback... So many times, with LOB applications, you have the need for installing a "driver" into your system, which winds up being some sort of data access component or other monitoring device used by the LOB application. What I'm thinking about is to use a ClickOnce strategy and build a driver that would get installed on the local machine, and then make a "local" webservice for when the user is offline.

Has anyone tried this scenario, and if so, what were the pros/cons of the method? If you didn't finalize on this method, then what was your final decision based on experience, and what would you advise going forward for someone trying to crack this nut for their project?

Hello,

I've been trying for supporting the direct database access in Silverlight since five or six months back. After exploring quite a few different to port the database to Silverlight, we got one POC working with one object database but it's a bit far for us to release it... I may probably write about this in my blog soon.

I dont think that making a "local" webservice is a good idea since the clients may not have any web service installed on their machine.

Michael Sync 2009-07-22 15:14:43

what I was thinking, since it's going to be around 99.9% windows users... create a WCF service that runs inside a windows service. My other thought was to see if there was a way, as you are mentioning, to try to include the SQL CE objects into the SL application and run it that way, although with the sandbox issue, that's still a hangup.

Richard B 2009-07-22 18:25:03

+1 A:

Here's the best I could find for a SQLite-ish experience:

http://silverdb.codeplex.com/

James Cadd 2009-07-23 18:28:13

what scares me @ having databases in the Isolated Storage is end users. I'm dealing with end users that we are all lucky they understand the concepts of E-mail and can handle the usage of their mobile phones. When you put them on a computer, and they see they are using a lot of Internet Cache files, they are the type to start deleting things without knowing what they do. My hope was to have the ability to backup the *.sdf file for them, so that database synchronization wasn't as painful... e.g. they weren't building a new database each time they access their data.

Richard B 2009-07-25 00:29:54

I understand about the users ;) The SL isolated storage is separate from the web browser cache though, so if they clear the cache it shouldn't effect SL.

James Cadd 2009-07-25 11:43:04

Try siaqodb - http://siaqodb.com , it is needed zero config, has small footprint, is very easy and simple to use.

sqo 2009-12-31 12:13:27

ansaurus

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Offline database access under Silverlight-3

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