How can I download doc, jpg and other files to PDA via CF.Net?

Hi all,

I really need some advice here - I'm developing a PDA app in Cf.net 2.0 with SQL Server 2005 on the server. The app allows medical professionals to take selected patients data with them when they go out to consult or to hospitals etc and as part of a patient's record there could be associated documents (say, referrals or letters from another doctor or text files or even JPG's/BMP's of xrays, etc) and what I need to do is when the user syncs with the server (via my CF.Net app) those files should be downloaded to the PDA so they can be opened there - so a .doc file will open with PocketWord for example.

My problem is literally how to do this! ActiveSynch does this stuff automatically if you copy a file manually but I want to downlaod these files to the PDA when a user chooses the patients to download. The metadata (file location, name, type, size etc) are all stored in SQL Server 2005 so how can I include these files in a synch process using RDA

Hope someone can help - I can't deliver the product or charge for it until I solve this problem!

TIA for any help,

Mike

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How can I download doc, jpg and other files to PDA via CF.Net?

KRF1111
Thanks Ilya - to be honest my PDA is an older one and only runs WM2003 so I didn't realise that WM2005 could use office documents. If that's the case then that saves me a lot of hassle since I certainly would be looking at rolling it out on WM2005 and probably not bothering with 2003.... looks like I need to go and buy a WM2005 PDA now!
dLloydm
Good point but I'm really looking for a solution to transfer all the different files with one mechanism. Most of the files will be Word docs or text files - I guess the images and the text files I could download via an HTTP request but the Word docs are the most important ones.
Ayaz Virani
HttpWebRequest can transfer any file from .aaa to .zzz as it does not care what's inside the file, it's all a stream of bytes to it. Once loaded, it’s up to you to figure out if you should launch Word, show a picture of do something else.
Ryn
Not quite that easy Ilya - Word and Excel files have to be converted to PocketWord and PocketExcel formats before they can used on the PDA - that's what ActiveSynch does when it transfers the files and I need to automate that process.

One thing I'm considering doing is running some code in the Winform on the server side to save the Word files as text files when they're added to a patient's record - then I'd not have any problem I don't think... it's just that it would be nice to keep the Word format so these type of documnets could appear in PocketWord.

What I don't understand is why there is no ActiveSynch SDK - you'd think this would be a very obvious addition to CF.Net!

Mike
Ri-Karou

As far as I remember WM 5.0 can handle Office documents without any conversion. For older platforms (anybody still planning new deployment on these ) your web server should convert documents before sending them to the device using ASP or ISAPI or whatever else runs on your server, device side remains unchanged. If you don’t want to deal with dynamic conversion, you can simply pre-convert all documents. There's no AS SDK in NETCF because AS APIs are on the desktop and NETCF is device only. OpenNetcf.org has managed wrapper for AS APIs. However it’s not clear to me how AS is relevant in this case You're not using AS and have normal HTTP connection, is that right
Visualbrin
On the whole topic of getting these files to (and from ) the PDA what would you recommend as a good architecture for this What I have at the moment in my SQL Server and Mobile databases are 2 tables which look like this:

PatientAttachments(
[PatientAttachmentID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
[PatientID] [int] NOT NULL,
[AttachmentTypeID] [int] NOT NULL,
[AttachmentLabel] [nvarchar](200) NOT NULL,
[Filename] [nvarchar](255) NULL,
[Path] [nvarchar](255) NULL,
[SizeInBytes] [bigint] NOT NULL,
[DateAdded] [datetime] NOT NULL,
[DateModified] [datetime] NULL,
[Notes] [nvarchar](255) NULL)

AttachmentType(
[AttachmentTypeID] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
[AttachmentDesc] [nchar](20) NOT NULL,
[AttachmentExtension] [nchar](5) NOT NULL)

Clearly the idea with the above tables is only to store the metadata in the database for the patient attachments (ie: not the actual attachment data itself) in order to keep the size of the DB down. So when the user of my PDA app synchs, any new or modified files for a patient on the server get downloaded to the PDA and stored on the SD card or other available storage. So, on the server I'd probably have a folder with these attachments, somehow named so they can always be tied to the correct patient ID then when I synch each patient with the server I can then search for any new/modified attachments and download only those ones, adding or modifying a database record in PatientAttachments. Conversely, depending on the client and their needs, I'd also possibly also have an "upload" mechanism so the attachments could be modified on the PDA if need be (although I'd prefer this not to happen) and synched back to the server in much the same way with the appropriate folder, file and DB rows on the server.

BTW, I think I'd be going down the RDA route for the synching so hopefully it would allow me to design and build a decent mechanism for exchanging these files.

Do you (or anybody else of course) have any comments or suggestions on this This is a really core part of my app so I want to try and get the architecture right before I plough into it!

Cheers,

Mike
Chori Pak
If the images are on an intranet then you can download them using the HttpWebRequest
How can I download doc, jpg and other files to PDA via CF.Net?

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