Re: How to merge 2 customers into 1?

David,

It sounds from the other responses that commitment control would be the way
to go. However, I'd like to know how long this process has been in place and
how often an error occurs. You said "We've just had a case where this
happened[...]" which leads me to believe that errors like this are pretty
rare.

Given that you have error-handling in place already (to notify the user of
an error, but to continue updating other files), so as long as the error
handling includes sufficient information (in error messages, audit logs
etc.) to pinpoint which file was not updated and why, I'd be inclined to
leave your processing as-is. If it ain't broke (define 'broke'!), don't fix
it.

Whether or not you use commitment control, you could possibly 'off-load'
this processing to a separate job, which would free up the interactive job
to continue processing.

Rory

On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 12:17 AM, David FOXWELL <David.FOXWELL@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

Hi,
I'm looking for advice and/or opinions on this method :

A user can display a list of clients sorted by name and date of birth in a
subfile. If all the names and dates of birth are equal for two clients, the
user has an option that will merge the 2 clients into one. This means that
one client number will become obsolete. There are about 30 different files
in which the obsolete client number is replaced by the remaining client
number. After confirmation by the user, the program loops through a file
that contains the files to be updated. For each file information is
extracted to create and execute an SQL update. If an error occurs on the
update, a message will be displayed to the user but the program continues
the updates on the remaining files. The user will see at the end that at
least one file update failed. We've just had a case where this happened, and
I must say I am rather surprised at this method of merging the clients in an
interactive application, but I am at a loss to think of a better way.

I am interested to read how others have resolved this problem.