Multi user application

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
Arthur - I hope this is all useful stuff.

WanWizard - thank you for taking the time to explain what you're doing - I'm feeling much better informed of the problem you're trying to solve here.

I grabbed ExiteCMS from VCS, but couldn't (quickly) find the schema and mechanism you're describing here. FWIW I was never advocating locking tables during a read request and holding them open for a web client until they clicked 'save'. I've not tried to solve this problem before, but (perhaps embarrassingly) I had always assumed that I would use a process that you disparagingly refer to as the '... old-fashioned way: lock, read, compare, act'. That is, the client gets a copy of all the data they're about to manipulate, no database tables are locked during this process - then when the client does an update/save operation, tables are locked, a transaction is started, data is re-read, compared to the data the user was basing their changes on, and at that point if there's a discrepancy the app has to 'handle it' - if there isn't, the changes are written, transaction is closed, tables are unlocked, life goes on.

As I say, though, I speak from the naiveté of never actually having had to do this before.

Btw, what's the etymology for Exite - I kept on getting confused trying to navigate around the directory structure because I keep typing excite.