> You described how threads introduce a problem in your program -- that of > generating a sequence of sequential identifiers -- but you didn't describe > the problem that threads are solving in your program. Maybe you don't > need them at all? What led you to threading in the first place? > > Jean-Paul
Well, the problem I thought they would solve is ensuring everyone got a sequential number. But I suppose they wouldn't solve that, since from what I gather thread access is somewhat arbitrary. So then, here is the crux of the issue. Worst case scenario, this program could be accessed by 5-10 people at a time and I need each one to have the current information. There are two places I know of that there might be multi-access problems. 1) This program is so that we can track one team passing assignments to another. Right now I have the names of everyone in team 2 in a list. People from team one launch this program and the program grabs a pointer (stored in a separate file). If person A launches the program and person B launches the program before person A assigns an order, they will both have the same pointer, so both orders will go to the same person. 2) Each assignment has a distinct identifier, which increments by 1 for each assignment (SR001001, SR001002, etc). Either these can be assigned manually (the current method), or they can be assigned automatically. If they are assigned manually, I need a way to show them the most recent number (that would be easy), if they are assigned automatically I need a way to save the number and pass the incremented number along (just like the pointer). But I have the same problem here as above. If two people launch the program at roughly the same time, they will pull the same data. Since these assignments tend to come in spurts, concurrent access is likely to be a problem. So, given those parameters (the rest of this program is a breeze, there's a class for each person on Team 2 and the class holds some info about them and a dictionary of assignments with the assignment number for the key and a value of [assigner, numberAssigned], the only other tricky thing for me has been logging because I've never had to do much of it before), how can I prevent these problems? The only thing that jumps out at me is a server/client model where a server runs and compiles all the entries, spitting back the result to each individual client. That way, all the working code lives in the server, ensuring that the working thread always has the right information, while the clients only pass data between the user and the server. But I guess that isn't technically multi-threading is it. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
