Mysterious clearing of records by users

[gradiva]

Hi... two of my users have reported in the last few days that some mysterious keystroke (they don't remember what they pushed) has cleared the ENTIRE record that they are working on.

One person says that all of the content just disappeared, but the record still remained present.

The other person says that the record was entirely deleted but there was no popup window to warn them.

I can't recreate either of these situations! arg... Does anyone out there have any ideas how either of these scenarios might occur?

Thank you for your kind help!

Gradiva

P.S.. while I'm at it, does anyone know of a nice list of FM6, MacOS keyboard commands that I could distribute to my users?

[Brian C]

So far as i know there is no keybaord combo that wipes out the contents of an entire record in version 6. Only a "revert record" could accomplish this - and only if the record has not been comitted.

As for theories...

A record appearing to have had its contents erased to display a blank record - sounds like they created a new record maybe using the Command N.

A record having been deleted sounds like they simply may have hit the Command E for delete record.

One thing you may want to consider is limiting access to specific menu item options by making use of the Access Privilages --> Passwords... under the file menu. This means you will have to create scripts linked to buttons that will allow your users to still have access to these commands, but it will make things a bit safer in the long run.

[gradiva]

Thank you, Brian... It's too bad the users don't recall seeing the popup warning when deleting a record. That is what is really throwing me off.

Today I eliminated their access privileges for deleting records. If I perform an action in a script - like deleting a record - will it overrule the user limitation on the access privileges? I didn't realize that.

Gradiva

[Brian C]

My suggestion was in reference to limiting the available menu items, this simply hides the menu items from the user but does not remove their ability to perform one of those actions if it is controlled by a script.

If the access privilages are set to disallow record deletion comletely, a script should not be able to override this. This prevents someone from attempting to "hack" past the security.

One thing to note: if the OPTION (ALT) key is held down while using the Delete command, it will bypass the dialogue box that is normally associated with deleting a record via the menu.