OWAS 3.0 and HTML Statelessness

Hi there,

  I was hoping I could get some suggestions on how I might go about solving this problem. I've been designing an internet application using Oracle Application Server 3.0. It deals with customer data, and the modification of it. It will work in conjunction with an app on Windows NT, which also accesses the same data. Right now, we have a field in the customer data table called "In Process." It's just a flag that is set while the customer is being accessed by one of the apps. With the NT app, it's simple to check and set because you just set it when you open the customer in the app, and reset it when you close the customer. We also have a phone app, which is what my app is designed after. With the phone app, we just set it when they call up, and reset it when they hang up. However, with my app, we encounter the statelessness of HTML.

  The way I currently designed my app, I check the flag when customers try to access one of the functions. If it's not "in process," I allow them to continue on. When I am actually doing an update, I set it, do the update, then reset it. This allows me to maintain the integrity of the data. However, this only just begins to solve my problems. Take this example: The customer logs in on my internet app, clicks on "Modify Order," and begins to modify one of their orders. While they're doing that, somebody else using the NT app accesses the customer and deletes the order. They can do this because I haven't set the "In Process" flag. Then, when the person using the internet app tries to modify the order, they get an error because it was just deleted.

     The obvious fix is to set the "In Process" flag when a customer logs in from the internet app. However, what if the customer closes their browser while they're still logged in? I could have a logout button...but not everybody would use it. Also, what if their computer crashes?

  Some of the ideas my co-workers and I have come up with are: have a temp table that I write to. Then, have a daemon that would do my checking according to flags and times entered. There are some obvious flaws with this though...Another idea was to have a table that kept track of time logged in (or in process). This way, I would set the "in process" flag when they logged in on the internet app. Then, if there was no activity for 10 or 15 minutes, they would get logged out. This could be done with a daemon that checked the table every minute and decremented a counter. However, I still don't think this is perfect. One thing I have problems with is that I am looking to have this app distributed to other companies. Thus, I want to be able to distrubute it without having to make major modifications to the company's database. I would ultimately like to make absolutely no changes to their database.

     So, this is my situation. I hope I made everything as clear as possible. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You,

Scott Taylor
Petrolsoft Corporation

-----== Posted via Deja News, The Leader in Internet Discussion ==----- http://www.dejanews.com/rg_mkgrp.xp Create Your Own Free Member Forum Received on Mon Sep 28 1998 - 11:26:24 CDT