Mobile Users Stay Connected Via Tactica Caprera, The First Offline TP Monitor

	Taking A CAIRful Approach To help you take into consideration the extra dimension mobile applications present to you, Tactica Corp. suggests using a CAIR (Clients, Actions, Inputs and Results) approach. This method breaks down mobile workers' transactions in terms of identifying clients, describing the system-related action a client takes, expressing the input data t he client needs in order to take an action and showing the results of that action. For instance, when employees incur reimbursable travel expenses on a business trip, they might use a Caprera-based application to record those expenses. The employees are the clients (for later expense-processing actions, the clients will be the employees' supervisors and then some accounting department personnel). In this example, the employees (clients) pay the fee for a rental car and record the payment on their expense report--that's an action. The inputs are the details on the rental receipts, and the results in this example are entries on the employees' expense reports. This example may seem oversimplified, but don't be fooled. A great deal of all business analysis for automation purposes consists of exactly the sort of thinking the CAIR approach encourages, and much can be gleaned from such analysis. For instance, an analysis that turns up an activity for which there is no client strongly implies an action that ex ecutes entirely on the server. A process identified by the CAIR approach typically becomes a Caprera activity. As you write CapreraScript to handle that activity, the CapreraBuild module lets you further break down the activity's actions into steps. The first step is the prolog, which gives you the opportunity to do some preliminary setup. The next is assignment, which gives work to a particular client. Extraction retrieves data from the database, according to the subsetting you've already done. In the task step, which happens when the client connects to the central database, data and instructions flow to the client for processing. Next, the update step makes appropriate changes to the central database. And, the epilog step is an opportunity to review and finalize the entire activity.

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