Question

We’ve got a set of forms in our web application that is managed by multiple staff members. The forms are common for all staff members. Right now, we’ve implemented a locking mechanism. But the issue is that there’s no reliable way of knowing when a user has logged out of the system, so the form needs to be unlocked. I was wondering if there was a better way to manage concurrent users editing the same data.

Answer 1

You can use optimistic concurrency which is how the .Net data libraries are designed. Effectively you assume that usually no one will edit a row concurrently. When it occurs, you can either throw away the changes made, or try and create some nicer retry logic when you have two users edit the same row.

If you keep a copy of what was in the row when you started editing it and then write your update as:

Update Table set column = changedvalue 
where column1 = column1prev 
AND column2 = column2prev...

If this updates zero rows, then you know that the row changed during the edit and you can then deal with it, or simply throw an error and tell the user to try again.

You could also create some retry logic? Re-read the row from the database and check whether the change made by your user and the change made in the database are able to be safely combined, then do so automatically. Or you could present a choice to the user as to whether they still wish to make their change based on the values now in the database.