Offline Mode

Offline mode is what a system keeps doing when the internet drops and the work has to carry on anyway. The screen stays open, the sale still goes through, and the record waits on the device until the connection comes back. Once it does, the sale is sent up and joins everything else. For a shop on a busy street, that gap decides whether the queue moves or walks out.

Not everything can be queued, and knowing which half is which is the whole design. A sale can wait, because the price and the product list already sit on the tablet. A card payment usually cannot, because the bank has to answer while the customer stands there, and a discount code checked against head office fails for the same reason. So anything needing an answer from elsewhere stops, while anything that only needs writing down carries on. Linkysoft draws that line on paper with the client before a single screen is built.

The surprises arrive at sync time rather than during the outage itself. The classic one is the duplicate receipt, where a cashier presses print, sees nothing, presses again, and two identical sales turn up an hour later. A system that numbers every sale on the device catches that pair, while one that numbers sales on the server cannot tell them apart. The other surprise is two branches editing the same record while both are cut off, because one of them is going to lose. You want to know in advance which one, and whether anybody is told.

Stock is where this hurts most, because two counters can sell the last unit of the same item while both are offline. The shelf ends up empty while the system still thinks there is one left. That is why Storek keeps stock branch by branch and raises a flag on the clash instead of quietly picking a winner. Linkysoft treats that flag as part of the design, because a silent overwrite only shows up weeks later in a stock count, when nobody can say which sale was real.

Three plain questions tell you most of what you need from a supplier. How long can we work offline before the device fills up, and what exactly stops working while we are cut off. And when the connection returns, who reviews the conflicts, because somebody has to. Linkysoft answers all three in writing before quoting a web application project, and the same questions apply to the phone app your delivery drivers carry.