Support for peer-to-peer data sync

[nblum37]

Hi :)

Is there a way to export a document, e.g. as a binary List format, and import it to another database instance including the metadata like revisionId? The idea behind this would be to send a document over e.g. BLE within an offline environment to another device.
Thank you :)

[blaugold]

Hey @nblum37,

there is no way to export and import documents, but there is a feature called peer-to-peer data sync, which allows data sync between two databases on different devices over any available transport channel.

Other Couchbase Lite SDKs (e.g. for iOS/macOS, Java, etc.) support this feature, but not the one for C, at least not currently. The Couchbase Lite C SDK is the one used, under the hood, by this package. So, if and when peer-to-peer sync becomes available for the C SDK, cbl could support it. I don't know about the plans of Couchbase for this feature and the C SDK, though.

Also peer-to-peer sync is an enterprise feature.

[nblum37]

Ah ok, thank you very much for your fast reply!
I was just wondering whether there might be any possibility to directly access the memory space of the documents after they were loaded or before they were saved. I know, that Couchbase Lite C SDK does not support the "official" way, yet, so I was looking for any kind of workaround.
Currently, we transfer the id & the content and let the replicator overwrite the offline transmitted document later as soon as wifi is available. But that is of course a very ugly way including some drawbacks...

[blaugold]

I see, sorry I don't have better news 😬
The biggest problem I see with transferring the documents like that, is that conflict resolution doesn't work like usual, but maybe that's OK or you can work around that, for now, for your use case.

I've reached out to Couchbase to see what their plans are for peer-to-peer sync.

[nblum37]

Ok, thank you :) Let's see, how they'll continue feature development.