Hey all. Been a while since I have been here.

I am building a DB for a general service contractor. The available services include lawn care and towing.

Although there are not necessarily "emergencies", but there are many requests that need to be tended to ASAP.
The owner still uses pen and paper mechanisms to handle the day to day stuff such as service request information,
payroll, employee benefits, inventory, etc and then call the employee that will be assigned the job.
This worked well as the business was started, but as things pick up, it is becoming more tedious.

As a friend to the client, I can also admit that he is almost as organized as an F-5 tornado.

After looking into software with the functionality we are looking for, it is unbelievably expensive. Also with the capital cost of
the hardware, going that route is really not feasible.

So.....here goes

We want a db that will track service requests fuel, mileage, maintenance, and depreciation of assets.
Serve as a sort of computer aided dispatch, car-to-car/car-to-cad messenger, and appointment register.
At the same time he wants to go to real-time invoicing as well. This is particularity important with the tow service.

So I have a job form that contains all of the particulars and enables staff to produce invoices at the time of service.
I also have put in the ability to add requests from the office, and the mobile terminals. The tables are linked through SQL Server back end,
and the links work perfectly.

Where the problem comes in, deals with comunication between the home computer and mobiles. If a service request is taken that
requires immediate attention, the home computer will send commands to the mobile to refresh the linked job table, and then pull up the job screen.

I know this could easily requery the linked table on a timer, then run the appropriate code to bring up the job form. We do not want to do this because
it would consume a lot of mobile data, and would congest the database calculations as well. We decided we want to push the data out to the mobile
instead of pulling it in to the mobile computer.

I cannot help but believe that there is a way to do this, if I could just figure out the appropriate connection string and file path syntax.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

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Reply from Alex Hedley:

There are Push Notifications in iOS that can send data down to the phone, I'm not sure there are the equivalent here.
You could save the date time that the user has opened the app then have a page reload that queries the dataset after that given time, thus pulling down only new data, update the date time after each load.