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 ......