Question about implementing user tracking

[Gabe]

I am trying to figure out how to implement a multi user system. As it stands, the sysetm works for a single user, but i want to be able to keep track of user id's for changes made and records added.

What is the best way to implement such a system? I read the book, about user accounts and privileges, but I am not sure how to keep an active user Id that can be affixed to new records and used to generate daily reports.

I haven't experimented with filemaker's user account managemnt too much, so I could be saying nonsense. However, it looks like filemaker only makes available the user account name? I think the best course of action is to make a table to hold all of the user information, but I'm not sure how to tie it to filemaker's or the server's authentication information.

Can somebody point me in the right direction?

[Gabe]

Wow I knew I was ignorant, but I didn't know I was so disturbingly stupid that nobody even bothers to answer.

[Fenton]

I use the account name. It is always available, as Get (AccountName), is one of the auto-enter options of a text field, at creation and modification, and is automatically tied into the authentication. I think no one answered because you dismissed the obvious solution.

If you have multiple files, it is good to have another table with the account names, to use for creation and deletion of accounts. You could see "statistics" per person there, though I would imagine you would mostly do your reports from the data tables themselves. What do you want to see in your reports?

[Gabe]

Thanks for replying.

Multi user systems are still a rather unexplored frontier for me. I was thinking that tracking the user name would be a bad idea in case the user name actually ever changed.

The solution I am working with now is pretty big, but its only a single file. Its mostly just simple file maintenance with just a dash of financial transaction tracking built in.

The user tracking comes into play when dealing with the transactions. Each user has to balance at the end of the day, so I have to track which transactions belong to whom.

I'd also like to have a few user preferences that they can change.

I know I'll need a user prefs table to keep track of stuff like full name, contact info, user id, etc. I'm guessing that I'll just have a logon script that checks to see who signed in, and then load or create the user prefs data. I was afraid to try anything, though, hoping that somebody here could give me tips on setting something like that up.