[RESOLVED] Advice on a project please...

I’m looking for a little advice on a project I’ve been asked to do for the company I work for.

What they are looking for is a service management system that will track the status of fault calls logged by our customers, basically I need to record the date / time the call was logged, the fault details and then the status of the call until it’s complete (users of the system will update the call history so a complete audit trail of the call is available).

I have a fairly good idea how I’ll go about this but what I’m unclear on is the fact that multiple users will be using the application at the same time. The data will be on a SQL server, can I just load the app onto each users PC and let them get on with it or do I need to link the users in some way to stop people working in the same record at the same time ?

I've never done anything with more than one operator before so I'm not too sure on this aspect.

I think you are mentioning something in regards to record locking, what happens when two users are trying to access the same file at the same time, which could matter a lot depending on your application (it was a little problem with medical records). ADO.NET is a disconnected model, and I really haven't had the time (or need) to actually go in and research record locking in depth, to see if there was a way to explicitly define locks in code. Because it is disconnected, however, and if you are real concerned about locking, this would require you to call the .Update methods of your data more frequently to ensure that the most up to date info is in the database at all times, or find a way to explicitly "lock" the record so that no one else can access it until you have finished with it (which is what I haven't researched yet, and kinda goes against the whole "disconnected" model, but is a very valid topic). However, in your situation, It seems that the issue of record locking isn't all too important (how often does the call records have to be accessed or updated??) .

I'm going off on a tangent here, but to answer your question, as long as you use decent ADO.NET practices, then running the program on multiple machines shouldn't be that much of a problem, since SQL is a multi user database. In regards to accessing the same records at the same time, this is possible, and it is also possible that both people are working on the same record at the same time since it is disconnected, but if you call your update methods appropriately, then I don't think this should be that big of a problem. Of course, this is only my lil opinion :)

Thanks for the advice, after thinking more about the project I'm pretty sure that being such a small company the problem of multiple users on the same record at the same time will be very rare, to the point of it not being a real concern.

No doubt i'll be posting more as I start working on this, I'm bound to get stuck at some point :D