A bit of a revelation this evening. I discovered something obvious, but missing from my understanding of the brilliant iOS example that ships with the Sync. Framework 4.0CTP It seems that on the server side if a record is edited, correctly only the fields that are modified gets sent down to your device (in my case an iPad). I was previously just blindly assuming that I'd get all fields down. I modified my Xcode population code (based on iOS sample) as follows:

+ (void)populateQCItems:  (id)dict withMetadata:(id)metadata withContext:(NSManagedObjectContext*) context
{
	QCItems *item = (QCItems *)[Utils populateOfflineEntity:dict withMetadata:metadata withContext:context];

	if (item != nil)  // modify new or existing live item
	{
		if ([dict valueForKey:@"Identifier"])  // new bit
			item.Identifier = [dict valueForKey:@"Identifier"];

		if ([dict valueForKey:@"InspectionTypeID"]) // new bit
			item.InspectionTypeID = [dict valueForKey:@"InspectionTypeID"];
		[item logEntity];
	}
}

I hope this helps someone else; as I learnt this the hard way.

Technorati Tags: Xcode, iOS, Azure, Sync Framework, Cloud