Android - Transfer data using sync adapters

Synchronize data with Server - Android

Synchronizing data between an Android device and web servers can make your application significantly more useful and compelling for your users.

What is SyncAdapter?

In simple terms, SyncAdapter is the standard and preferred way to sync application data with a server, cloud, or MBaaS backend. SyncAdapter is the most efficient way to make your application up-to-date. It helps you to provide fresh data when the user starts an application. By using this, you can improve your user experience by not making wait for the user till you call the web service and fetch the data. Popular android applications like Google, Twitter, Whatsapp, Facebook, etc. use SyncAdapter. You can check this by going to Setting -> Account.

Why SyncAdapter? 

Although you can design your own system or structure for doing data transfers in your app, you should consider using Android's sync adapter framework. This framework helps manage and automate data transfers and coordinates synchronization operations across different apps. When you use this framework, you can take advantage of several features that aren't available to data transfer schemes you design yourself.

Plug-in architecture

Allows you to add data transfer code to the system in the form of callable components.

Automated execution

Allows you to automate data transfer based on a variety of criteria, including data changes, elapsed time, or time of day. In addition, the system adds transfers that are unable to run to a queue and runs them when possible.

Automated network checking

The system only runs your data transfer when the device has network connectivity.

Improved battery performance 

Allows you to centralize all of your app's data transfer tasks in one place so that they all run at the same time. Your data transfer is also scheduled in conjunction with data transfers from other apps. These factors reduce the number of times the system has to switch on the network, which reduces battery usage.

Account management and authentication 

If your app requires user credentials or server login, you can optionally integrate account management and authentication into your data transfer.

Note: Sync adapters run asynchronously, so you should use them with the expectation that they transfer data regularly and efficiently, but not instantaneously. If you need to do real-time data transfer, you should do it in an AsyncTask or an IntentService.

How SyncAdapter Works?

To create the sync adapter component, start by extending AbstractThreadedSyncAdapter and writing its constructors. Use the constructors to run setup tasks each time your sync adapter component is created from scratch, just as you use Activity.onCreate() to set up an activity. For example, if your app uses a content provider to store data, use the constructors to get a ContentResolver instance. Since a second form of the constructor was added in Android platform version 3.0 to support the parallelSyncs argument, you need to create two forms of the constructor to maintain compatibility.

You can find SyncAdapter Demo provided By Google here. Android Basic SyncAdapter Sample

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