Shuffle and Tracks

As I mentioned in a previous post I’ve been working on getting the Android application, Shuffle to synchronize with Tracks.

Now that the work has continued this post describes how this feature of Shuffle works. This feature is released with version 1.4.0 of Shuffle and will be available on the Android Market. Special thanks to Andy whom put up with my loads patches.

This feature affects no other features in Shuffle, it simply allows the synchronization between the two systems. If you never configure the synchronization feature it will never affect you.

Configuration

To configure Shuffle to synchronize with tracks start the Shuffle application.

Press menu, and select settings. Select the option called “Change synchronization”

This will open the settings file. Here you can enter the URL to your Tracks installation, username and password. You can also specify the settings for the background synchronization. Simply change the combo box between the different settings.

There is some validation in the settings screen. If you enter a invalid URL the text will change to red to display this.

When you save your settings they are validated by trying to download the contexts from Tracks. If Shuffle cannot get any content from Track with the specified settings it will not save them, but instead display an error message saying that something is wrong with them. You can always cancel.

The Synchronization

Once Shuffle is configured to synchronize with Tracks. You will have an extra button available in the menus across Shuffle. Pressing this will start the synchronization process. To notify that a synchronization is in progress Shuffle will also add a notification message during the synchronization. This is to notify the user that Shuffle synchronizes when doing background synchronization. If you click the notification Shuffle will display the synchronization view.

The synchronization synchronizes the entities in Shuffle in the following order: Contexts, Projects, and Tasks. During a synchronization Shuffle will look at the modification date and select the version of the entity that was latest modified, and merge this entity with the local entity or remote entity, which ever is updated.

Tracks only accept Tasks that have a context set, currently these tasks are excluded from the synchronization process. If you have such task a message is displayed at the end of the synchronization process.