Concept Help

[ubkra]

I have small business application which several employees will use.

On this application i'll have a "shared" notepad. the contents will be in shared text file saved on a network drive.

I was thinking of using a stream reader to read it's contents every 15 seconds.

When a user has edited something i'll save it using stream writer.

Can anyone think of any issues using this system? is there a better way

One thought I had was what would happen if one user was reading the file and someone else tried to write it. Would that throw and error?

[jmcilhinney]

The obvious issue is two users making changes at the same time. Exactly how much text are you talking about?

[ubkra]

That's another very obvious issue I hadn't considered.
I'm talking about small notes, 5-15 words max per note.

[jmcilhinney]

That sounds more like a job for a database. You can then take advantage of the in-built concurrency support in ADO.NET.

[ubkra]

I wanted to minimise database use.

What if each user had thier own file, I would order each file by last date edited and read each file in that order?

maybe also limit each users filesize?

[jmcilhinney]

I wanted to minimise database use.

For what reason, may I ask? Maybe it's legitimate but maybe it's misguided. I'd certainly much rather use a database than files for this.

[ubkra]

Just worried about using to many tables (getting access was a big favour)

[jmcilhinney]

Define "too may" tables. I would expect that this would take one, maybe two tables. Anyway, it really doesn't matter how many tables you use. What matters is how many records you have in them.

[ubkra]

I've been given access to a database which is largely used for other purposes. They gave me permission based on using 3 tables and have agreed on another 10 tables. I’m a little concerned about asking for more

What table structure would you use?

[jmcilhinney]

I can't say exactly what schema is appropriate because I don't know exactly what you need to store but it would only take one table to store these notes.