New iOS Beta2 SDK now available

Question

We've recently released a beta2 version of the Mobile Services iOS SDK with offline support. See the
changelog for a list all changes in this release.
We've added a lot of new features, including:
- Support for incremental sync (breaking change to pullWithQuery method signature)
- Query parameters for pull operations
- Soft delete support
- Force purge of local data
Get new SDK
To use the new SDK, delete your existing Mobile Services framework, and add the
new beta2 iOS SDK. Or, you can try a new Todo List sample by following the
updated offline tutorial.
Update calls to pullWithQuery
Once you have updated to the new SDK, your project will fail to compile because of a change to the signature of pullWithQuery, which now takes a queryID as a parameter.
Each time a pull operation retrieves new results, the SDK saves the query ID and the most recent updated timestamp of the result. Incremental sync uses this timestamp to pull only those records that have been added or modified since the last sync. The query
ID should be a descriptive string that is unique for each logical query in your app. To opt-out of incremental sync (which is potentially inefficient), pass nil as the query ID.
So, calls to pullWithQuery should now be similar to the following:
[self.syncTable pullWithQuery:query queryId:@"allTodoItems" completion:^(NSError *error) { /* ... */ } ];
Update Data Model
The new incremental sync feature also requires a few changes to system tables in the Core Data store. If you haven't yet released your app and you have synced all of your data to your mobile service, the easiest way is to uninstall your app, then update
your SDK and data model. The data model changes are listed below.
Alternatively, you can use
lightweight Core Data migration to upgrade to a new data model. Download
this model definition for a sample todo app as the basis for a new model.
Model changes
In MS_TableOperations, add a new attribute:
  - tableKind of type Integer 16
In MS_TableOperationErrors, add two new attributes:
  - tableKind of type Integer 16
  - operationId of type Integer 64
Add a new Entity named MS_TableConfig with the following attributes:
 - id of type String
 - table of type String
 - key of type String
 - keyType of type Integer 64
 - value of type String
If you have any questions about offline sync or the new beta2 SDK, please post here!

Answer 1

You’re correct that you cannot use fetchLimit and fetchOffset if you are using incremental sync. Essentially the SDK is managing the batching behavior for you, and we have currently hardcoded a batch size of 50. If you need to limit the actual size
of the full query results, I recommend using the query itself, such as limiting the date range of records retrieved. Alternatively, you can add code in the backend to put a hard limit on query result size, regardless of how many skip and top requests come
from the client. 
Our new sample always queries the server when online, but by default all reads will only go to the local store. You have to explicitly call pull or push in order to make a server request.