Re: Creating a trigger program

On Mon 05-May-2011 19:56 , jmmckee wrote:

We are looking into a process to notify doctors, via email, when one
of their patients has been admitted. When a patient is admitted, a
record is written to a log file. Current idea being tossed around is
to read the log file from the previous day and send emails as needed.
I thought this might be an ideal application for a trigger program.
I could see the trigger getting fired on a write to the log file.
All I would want to do is pass the data to be written to a program
and the program would either send or not send an email. <<SNIP>>

Does business logic dictate that all rows inserted into the log file should be processed as such [evaluated if, and then to send an e-mail, based solely on the data in each row], or only dictate that the rows that this specific application chooses to log should be processed as such? If the latter, seems to me the trigger may be less appropriate, especially if the work is just offloaded to be performed asynchronously [as alluded in other messages is the case] since the trigger would seem to be adding a level of indirection with little benefit. Obviously there may be other reasons for which the logic must be or is better performed outside the existing application; i.e. no capability, or otherwise undesirable for whatever reason(s), to modify the application itself.

Regards, Chuck