Re: Generically Handling Record Locks in *PSSR

[Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The "in use" flag works, but it is overkill in my opinion.  The easiest 
solution I believe is to add the (n) extender to the chained file, and 
then at the update of the record, chain again.  Save a copy of the 
fields you care about  in a data structure when you do that first chain 
(n) and then make a compare at the time of your chain for update.    
(You really only care about the fields you can update, not all of the 
fields. If Sally changes the zip code and Betty changes the credit code 
then there is no conflict.) 

David Wright wrote:
> Thanks to all for the quick replies.  After my research I was fairly certain
> the answer was going to be no, unless all my apps just happened to be
> cycle-driven with the only read as the first line of the C-specs.  I find it
> hard to believe that anyone ever really wrote code like that, but they added
> the option so someone must have.
>
> I was a little over-dramatic what I said they had no logic for error
> handling.  The did in fact have a *PSSR on every file, but all it did was
> dump the program which is equivelant to no logic in my book.
>
> As for the suggestions to use 'In Use' flags or similar record-locking
> techniques, that is part of what we have been doing.  The first step is to
> see WHY the lock happened, which as Booth guessed is often poorly written
> code which locks records in update files unneccesarily.  We have fixed a lot
> of bad code the past month or so.  Some of it years (think 6 to 8 years)
> old....
>
> I definitely did not want to automatically hide the problem, but just come
> up with a recovery that did not involve dumping the user's program.
>
> Anyhow, thanks for the input.
>