Offline Mode¶

The purpose of the offline mode is twofold:

• You may use the offline mode to avoid long synchronisation times when developing in a situation poor network connectivity without turning off network connectivity as a whole.
• You may use the offline mode to prohibit download of latest changes from a central repository ahead of time. So you may use it as a "development in isolation" feature.

How the offline mode is used.¶

The offline mode can be turned on and off via a system property and interactively on the GUI.

Design¶

• Component Repository use AbstractRepository.checkOffline() whenever a connection is normally required.

The method looks essentially like this:

    protected void checkOfflineMode() {
        if (Foundation.isOffline()) {
            throw new OfflineModeException("Running in offline mode");
        }
    }

where @Foundation.isOffline()* checks for the boolean String value of the system property com.zfabrik.offline.

• Changing the system property can happen any time
• Initially the property is assumed as false and should only be specified otherwise in runtime.properties.
• The system property status is backed in a JMX MBean attribute of the newly created Foundation MBean.
• We use the internal JMX implementation to broadcast attribute changes to all worker processes.
• There is a toggle checkbox in the GUI.