Error 303 on record creation

[Matt Haughton]

When a developer is accessing the schema of a served file, thus locking the schema to all other users, the New Record step will not work, it stays in the current record and returns error 303.

I understand that editing schema on a served file that is currently in use is bad practice and should never be done, I don't make a habit of this. However, FileMaker deems any access to field options to be editing the schema, regardless of whether you click Cancel on the options dialog.

So viewing a calculation or checking the validation on a field would mean all user attempts to create a new record would fail until you hit OK or Cancel on the Define Database dialog. Of course any user scripts that try to enter data in the new record would actually enter data into the record the user was in before calling the New Record step.

As I say I don't make a habit of editing live schema but many of my users have developer access and though they can be told, I'd like to learn to trap and handle these errors in my scripts.

I've searched this forum and the Knowledge Base and can't find too much on the subject.

Can anyone point me in the direction to get more information? Specifically what actions lock and unlock a file's schema.

Does anyone know if there are other script steps that require the schema to be unlocked in order to work? I should imagine 'Relookup Field Contents' would but have done no testing on this.

In light of this and to keep processes somewhat transactional would it be a good idea to

- Decide what records need to be created at the beginning of a process

- Go create those records storing serial numbers to them in globals

- Then run the process accessing the records using the SN as needed

I understand this won't work for some processes and immediately makes a process more complex, but it does enable an easy rollback if the transaction is mission critical.

Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.