[261] in Tooltime
Record Locking
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Lynne E. Sousa)
Wed Sep 25 14:18:11 1996
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 1996 14:14:42 -0400
To: tooltime@MIT.EDU
From: "Lynne E. Sousa" <sousa@MIT.EDU>
Cc: rosato@MIT.EDU
Good Afternoon,
After being home sick for two days and also having chatted with a couple of
people I have come up with two proposals around record locking for release 1.
1. Abandon record locking completely. Revert to the way scopus is designed
and let the last one to hit save wins.
This is not good for several reasons, 1. Data integrity goes out the
window., 2. Customer service goes out the window, 3. Communication and other
important information can be lost, 4. Time and resources are wasted.
2. Go into release with the record locking code that is currently in place,
add two buttons to the screen, one accessible by the career staff and one
accessible by all help desk consultants. The record locking and call back
code currently in place works but leaves records in a locked state, to
prevent this consultants will need to clear the screen before choosing an
item from a search result set. The two buttons to be added to the screen
will be My Locks and All Locks. All consultants, student and career, will
see the My Locks button. This button will locate all records locked by the
currently logged in username. At the end of a shift part of the routine
will be to hit My Locks, clear any locks present, then log out of Scopus.
The career staff members will see the All Locks button. This will search
and present a result set with all locked records in the database. This
button can be used when someone has left without logging out or clearing
their own locks.
The second method while not perfect is as close as we can get for now. This
method will help maintain data integrity, improves response time, allows
more access to removing locks from records.
For Release 2 record locking as a whole can be revisited, revised, changed
or made more automatic.
Food for thought.
Lynne
Lynne E. Sousa
Computing Help Desk
11-226A
8-5857
