When the app cannot reach the office

The two things that look the same and are not

"The app can't connect" covers two entirely different situations, and the screen tells them apart even when they feel the same at arm's length. Losing signal is normal and needs nothing from you. Everything else is a failure, and it gives you two buttons.

No signal: the offline strip

When the phone has no usable connection, a strip appears at the bottom of the list:

You're offline. Viewing cached data.

At the same time, the refresh button at the top right turns into an offline mark. Tap it and you get an alert headed Offline — "You're currently offline. Please check your internet connection." — rather than a refresh that would sit and spin.

Nothing has gone wrong and nothing is lost. The app has stopped asking, because asking would fail, and it is showing you the last board it successfully fetched.

What still works

• Reading the board. Every job the phone had when it last connected is still there, on all three tabs.
• Opening a job. The whole job screen — the request, the customer, the site, the notes, the files list — comes out of what the phone already holds.
• Searching. The search box works on the list you have, so a reference read out over the phone still finds the job.
• Ringing the customer, and navigating to the site. Both hand off to the phone's own apps, which do not need the office.

What does not

Everything that changes something: claiming a job, marking it ongoing, completing it, adding a photo. Try one and you get No connection — "You're offline. Check your connection and try again." Nothing is queued and sent later, and the app never pretends a job moved when it did not. What you typed stays on the screen, so coming back into range and pressing the button again is the whole recovery.

This is the one thing worth telling a new technician: if you complete a job at the bottom of a driveway with no bars, it is not completed until you press the button somewhere with signal. The screen will tell you so at the time.

Coming back into range

You do not have to do anything. The app notices the connection returning and refreshes itself immediately, and the strip goes away. If you would rather not wait, pull the list down.

While it is running and in front of you the app refreshes about once a minute anyway. If the office's system is the thing that is unreachable rather than your signal, it slows that down step by step rather than hammering it — so a board that has been stale for a while may take a moment longer to catch up than you expect. Pulling the list down always asks straight away.

The error screen, and its two buttons

When something fails that is not a connection problem, the list is replaced by a screen with a warning mark, whatever the office's system actually said, and two buttons. The message is worth reading before you touch either — where the server had something specific to say, that is what is on screen.

"Try again"

The first answer, and the right one almost every time. It re-fetches the board. Server hiccups, a request that arrived at a bad moment, a deploy going out at the office — all of these clear on a second attempt.

"Sign out and set up again"

The second one, and it is a bigger hammer than it looks: it clears the saved session off the phone, so you will need a fresh code from the office to get back in. See signing in on your phone.

Press it when the message is about your session rather than about a job — "Your session has expired. Please set up your account again." is the usual wording — or when Try again has failed several times while other things on the phone are plainly working. If somebody else has signed in as you on another handset, this is also what you will see, because signing in on a second device signs the first one out.

Signing out never loses work. Everything you have submitted is on the job already; the phone is the only thing that forgets.

When to ring the office

When the message names something the office can act on — a job that has moved on, a job that is not yours, a code that will not take. Those are all covered elsewhere on this shelf, and none of them is fixed by signing out. Start with taking a job and updating a job from the van.