Concept Help

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?

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

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

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

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?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ubkra

I wanted to minimise database use.

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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.

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

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.

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?

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.