How to prevent multiple users from having concurrent access to a form instance ?
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How to prevent multiple users from having concurrent access to a form instance ?
 
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I have a form that has many instances - lots of filled-in copies of the form. There are also multiple users in each role, and role-based security is implemented.
I'm having a problem where two or more users in the same role can access the same instance of a form, and both users are able simultaneously to edit the form instance, which causes an issue when they also both save their copy of the form. I want to have any user with the correct role access the form, but only one user in any role able to open the form for editing; I don't care if multiple users can simultaneously open the form to read it. Singleton forms as implemented in Orbeon Server v4.8 doesn't seem to be the correct answer, yet this feels like a problem that would have been solved before. Can anyone give me some pointers please ? Thanks. |
Re: How to prevent multiple users from having concurrent access to a form instance ?
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Hi James, This is something for which we have no support at the moment. Taking an optimistic approach to concurrent modifications, we could imagine: - Upon opening a form, if someone else is editing the same piece of data, warn the user, telling her that should she decide to go ahead a "collision" might happen. - If she decide to go ahead, warn the other user someone decided to edit the data at the same time he did. - When saving, if the data has changed since it was loaded, warn the user she might overwrite changes done by someone else. If the above was implemented, even a subset thereof, would that be good for the use case you have in mind? As a placeholder, for now we have this RFE: Alex On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 at 2:09 PM, James Newcombe <[hidden email]> wrote: I have a form that has many instances - lots of filled-in copies of the form. You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Orbeon Forms" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [hidden email]. To post to this group, send email to [hidden email].
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RE: How to prevent multiple users from having concurrent access to a form instance ?
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Hi Alex, I thought that might be the case. I get the impression that our solution is a relatively unusual use of your product.
Your approach sounds reasonable, although it’s probably a little more sophisticated than I was looking for. For our use case, we simply want to forbid a second
user from opening the form if someone is already editing it, with a ‘go away’ message to the user attempting to open the form. Your solution assumes that users are intelligent and considerate, and I think my experience would lead me to a somewhat more proscriptive
approach. I also need the solution fairly quickly, so I suspect I’ll have to engineer it myself.
I think that the simplest thing to do is to build a database table that records a lock for each form that is opened, and releases the lock when it is closed.
I’d assume I’d be able to modify the behaviour of the ‘open form’ code and the behaviour of the ‘save’ and ‘submit’ buttons to do that. Can you tell me which source files I’d need to look at to find the code that opens the form and that handles the ‘save’
and ‘submit’ buttons ? Thanks, James. From: Alessandro Vernet [via Orbeon Forms community mailing list]
[mailto:ml-node+[hidden email]] Hi James, This is something for which we have no support at the moment. Taking an optimistic approach to concurrent modifications, we could imagine: - Upon opening a form, if someone else is editing the same piece of data, warn the user, telling her that should she decide to go ahead a "collision" might happen. - If she decide to go ahead, warn the other user someone decided to edit the data at the same time he did. - When saving, if the data has changed since it was loaded, warn the user she might overwrite changes done by someone else. If the above was implemented, even a subset thereof, would that be good for the use case you have in mind? As a placeholder, for now we have this RFE: Alex On Sun, Jun 21, 2015 at 2:09 PM, James Newcombe <[hidden email]> wrote: I have a form that has many instances - lots of filled-in copies of the form. -- -- If you reply to this email, your message will be added to the discussion below: To unsubscribe from How to prevent multiple users from having concurrent access to a form instance ?,
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RE: How to prevent multiple users from having concurrent access to a form instance ?
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Administrator
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Hi James, Yes, what you suggest is sometimes referred as a "pessimistic" approach, in that it completely stops users before they get a chance to get into a situation where they overwrite someone else's data. However it isn't that simple as you need to decide when to release the lock on the form, and you can easily get into situations where you keep the data locked for too long or not long enough. Specifically, what does it mean to close a form? What if a user keeps it open in a tab for a while? You know the user won't be able to interact with it when her session expires, but you might not want to keep the lock for that long. You could rely on "pings" through Ajax the page does to the server from time to time; if the server doesn't get a ping a little while, it is most likely that the tab was closed. Let's say: send a ping every minute, and release the lock if you don't get any ping for 5 minutes. But what if, instead, the user closed the lid of her laptop and reopens it 10 minutes later? At that point, you'll want to re-acquire the lock, and if somebody already has the lock, block the user from editing the data. This is interesting, but not entirely trivial to implement well ;). Alex On Wed, Jun 24, 2015 at 1:19 AM, James Newcombe <[hidden email]> wrote:
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RE: How to prevent multiple users from having concurrent access to a form instance ?
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Administrator
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And I noticed we have a different RFE for this as well:
https://github.com/orbeon/orbeon-forms/issues/1067 Since that one has more details, I closed #1332 as duplicate. -Erik |
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