In my solution I have a form that will be accessed and updated very frequently in a relative short period of time.
Chances that different people update the same info are small but not to be excluded.
What shall I do? Lock the record or not?
What is wisdom, who has experience with this. With FileMaker one doesn’t have to think about this for one minute now we have to give it some thought… So this is quite new to me…
Question is: Why not lock the record?
Good question, can’t tell why not but then again. Why the choice?
Just to be on the save side… especially in the case of financial transaction very important
We’ve set record locking off by default, because most of the time there’s no need for it. (what’s the point in locking an address record if every one is going to fill in the same street name in the first place)
This also eliminates the situation where the user goes into a record and decides to go for lunch.
You should be carefull though in situations where it’s crucial that a user can rely on the fact that the information he sees in his record, can’t be changed by any one while he’s IN the record.
example:
a customer calls , and asks the user if he has a product in stock.
Users looks for the product, computer says 4 in stock, and he sells customer 2 pieces. Turns out that his collegue just sold the last 4 pieces while he was looking at the stock counter.
If you use record locking here , the user can only get into the record, after his colleque finishes his transaction, resulting in a a stockcount of 0.
(other way around: the user comes in first, locks the record, sees 4 in stock, sells 2, closes transaction, after that his colleque may come in and sees 2 in stock)
So, after a record has been locked somebody else can’t change it untill an unlock. But can the other person look at the card or is it totally inaccessible?
BTW your example is excellent! Clarifies the world to me!
you can look at the record, but it will give you a popup when trying to enter the record.