Locking down the system for batch processing

[Elkpodemiami]

Hello all,

 

This is my problem and I hope someone has a solution or suggestion for this as I've been researching and I can't fix this issue I have with the company I work for, we currently use Filemaker 6 (.fp5), Our company gathers order from different websites, we download the order from a centralized place in a csv file, then we run a process manually 3 times a day where someone does the order processing batch which is an automatic process.

 

I would like to know if there is any possibility of blocking users from entering or modifying records while this process is being done, most of the time someone is clicking on a record somewhere which makes the database being locked up (we process the csv file & manual orders being input in the system at the same time). This issue leads to many things, not changing the status of the order, not running the credit card payment process which we use the eAuthorize plugin, and many other things.

 

It came to a point where I need to lookup on this as we're having problems with customers by not having the order processed correctly.

 

If there is something that can be done like for example, every time the process starts switch all the users to a black screen that says "processing new orders" or something similar which will lock them from modifying records please let me know.

 

Thank you very much in advance.

[Fitch]

You may need to approach this in the opposite direction: add error-trapping steps and create a log of which records could not be updated during the batch process. You could then either manually update the records later, or add them to the next batch or something.

 

Another possible approach might be a plugin like Troi Activator. If you have it installed and set up on all your machines, you would be able to trigger a script on those machines.

[Elkpodemiami]

I believe my best bet right now would be to write a new DB with error logs, This way I can monitor better what exactly the problems could be.

 

Thank you very much for your reply. Greatly appreciated!