1360359 - Round-tripping Form Autofill sync engine

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Android Sync, enhancement, P3)

Description

[:Grisha Kruglov]

We're adding a new Form Autofill sync engine on Desktop to sync "user profiles". Let's land a simple round-tripping engine on Android in unison, even though we won't be using that data on mobile just yet.

Main goal for now is to provide a measure of data redundancy for the new data type.

Proposed behaviour:
- store profiles as JSON blobs in form_autofill table in the main browser.db
-- schema: id|guid|json|created|modified|is_deleted
- for now this table will be only accessed by sync. No local modifications are supported
- INSERT OR REPLACE incoming records
- upload records only on "first sync" to our current node, that is whenever we're syncing since=0

Desktop's implementation of profile storage is backed by a JSON file. Proposed storage above might not be ideal for an eventual implementation of autofill on Fennec, but it shouldn't be difficult to migrate/modify it when the time comes and the storage requirements are clearer.

Comment 1

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Attachment: Bug 1360359 - WIP Part 1: Simple FormAutofill migration and ContentProvider

Missing CP portion

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/134514/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/134514/

Comment 2

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Attachment: Bug 1360359 - WIP Part 2: Simple round-tripping FormAutofill sync stage

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/134552/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/134552/

Comment 3

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Attachment: Bug 1360359 - WIP Part 3: TODO stuff

- enable stage
- split History > History+Forms sync pref
- Drive Form History and Form Autofill from the Forms sync pref

Review commit: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/134554/diff/#index_header
See other reviews: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/134554/

Comment 4

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Comment on attachment 8862654 [details]
Bug 1360359 - WIP Part 1: Simple FormAutofill migration and ContentProvider

Review request updated; see interdiff: https://reviewboard.mozilla.org/r/134514/diff/1-2/

Comment 5

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Random thought, but is there any reason we can't do this for addons and prefs too?

Comment 6

[:Grisha Kruglov]

Generally, no hard reason, just development bandwidth - but as you can see here, we can put something together reasonably quickly. As with anything mobile, we need to be mindful of our footprint on the device, especially for features that don't provide immediate benefit to the user other than data redundancy.

I'm not very familiar with the two engines and what their data looks like. Out of the two, add-ons will have less storage impact? IIRC prefs are used for all sorts of interesting things - but that might also make them more valuable.

Comment 7

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

(In reply to Mark Hammond [:markh] from comment #5)
> Random thought, but is there any reason we can't do this for addons and
> prefs too?

Add-ons and prefs are app-scoped, so maybe it'd be a bit weird to be snapshotting another app's prefs…

Comment 8

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

(In reply to Richard Newman [:rnewman] from comment #7)
> Add-ons and prefs are app-scoped, so maybe it'd be a bit weird to be
> snapshotting another app's prefs…

Yeah, but as mentioned in comment 0, it's more about redundancy. I was 1/2 expecting that one table as described in comment 0 (but with the table having a better name) would almost get all engines "for free", but I'm really not bothered at all, and Grisha's point about trying to minimize resources is a good one.

Comment 9

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.