Offline Inventory Scanning with Zebra DataWedge and Couchbase Mobile

Many of Zebra’s enterprise Android devices will find themselves running either offline or in a partially connected environment; be it in a warehouse, retail store or on the road with intermittent 2G coverage the device will not always be able to communicate with the back-end system.

Over the years we have seen many solutions to address the issue of partial connectivity, with greater or lesser success.  An increasing number of modern enterprise developers are using Couchbase - a hugely popular open-source distributed NoSQL database to provide their data persistence along with Couchbase Mobile to provide data synchronisation between mobile devices, even when connections are poor.  This means you can use Zebra devices for data collection safe in the knowledge that the data will be persisted with minimal effort on the part of the application developer.

Back in September Zebra hosted a joint DEVTALK webinar with Couchbase on “Securely synchronizing locally stored data​” to help address this common architectural concern and show how Couchbase mobile can be used to solve the problem -  if you want to view the DEVTALK again then the presentation is available on YouTube.

The Couchbase team have written up the advice in a recent blog, “Offline barcode scanning with Zebra DataWedge and Couchbase Mobile” where they cover an example ‘Inventory’ application, scanning barcodes with Zebra’s DataWedge and synchronising those barcodes with a Couchbase back-end database. 

The application developer does not have to worry about failing commits, connectivity timeouts or anything else that could cause data persistence to fail, the synchronisation just works.

Please check out the blog on Couchbase’s website for more detail.  Couchbase have also made the sample app code available on Github under Apache 2.0