In Maximo Mobile, data is retrieved & sent via the Navigator primarily using what's called a mobile schema (/maximo/oslc/graphite/mobile/schema). It's designed to fetch the data up front for all the applications & then operate primarily offline. Once data has been downloaded, by default, it will not go back to the server without some other action triggering it (such as a forceSync()).
In your example, your data is dynamic at run-time, so the traditional design doesn't work. There is a concept called mobile-server-search that can be set on the datasource to indicate that it's fetched from the server at run-time and will be limited in the fetch to the page-size defined on the datasource. IE if your page-size is 10, it will only fetch 10 records. You could use the setQBE to set the assetnum, location, etc. criteria that would then be executed on the server.
Unrelated to your use case, you should NOT mix and match object structures for the same data type (WORKORDER in this case). Mixing HALMOBWODETAIL & MXAPIWODETAIL for example will cause problems with the app unless you get really complicated. There was some functionality built for ACM's application to utilize different object structures for the same dataset but it's more complex and not really documented.