As others have mentioned, this is a tricky thing to do.
What others haven't mentioned is a way to do it.
Let's say you just showed the update form to two users. It contains the
fields that they are allowed to update and the values in those fields had
been retreived from the database.
Both users see a form like this:
Today's High Temperature
------------------------
City: Detroit
Temp (degrees F): 47
( Submit )
The city field is not available for update (presumably the editor/user
selected it off of a previous menu), and their task is to update today's
high temperature for Detroit. One of the editors has information that the
high temperature reached 49 degrees F, and the other editor has information
that the high temperature has reached 50. (Perhaps one of the editors is
overworked and hadn't gotten to enter the new high, or the temperature is
changing very quickly.)
So one of the people enter 50 and the other enters 49. Both hit submit.
What needs to be done right at that moment to protect it from changing the
value to 50 degrees (which is the correct, most recent, data) and then
immediately changing the value to 49 degrees (which is now out of date)?
Basically, you have to pass the original value to the script that is the
ACTION of the HTML form. This way, you have the original value that may
have been updated and the new value.
The first thing the HTML form's ACTION script has to do is get the record
from the database again. (Use SELECT ... FOR UPDATE if available, so the
RDBMS might lock the row.) If the value you get from the SELECT is the
same as the original value, go ahead and run the UPDATE to change the value
to the new value. If not, then generate and display a screen telling the
editor that the value has been updated by someone else...you can show the
value and ask if they want to proceed with the update, but that's all up to
you and/or your interface designers.
This is all similar to how folks design old fashioned screen-oriented
database systems (like with CICS).
Good luck,
Doug
At 01:47 PM 4/18/01 +0200, Nicolas Guilhot wrote:
>Hi,
>
>How can I avoid two or more users to update the same record at the same time
>?
>
>Ideally, I would like to lock the record when a user open it for
>modification. So if another user try to open the same record he'll be warned
>or get record values as read only. Is this possible and how to do it with
>PHP ?? How can I know that the user that has locked the record has finished
>with it, if he never commits his changes ? Is there an FAQ about this ?
>
>Regards,
>
>Nicolas
>
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