Refresh screens on other PC's

[Marc Vanzegbroeck]

Hi,

I have an application running in a truck-transport company.
They handle the planning with my program. They working with 10 people together. With a browse they can see what truck have to go to what place.
If anyone change, or add a route they want automaticly refresh the screens of the other users, so they see direcly the latest status.
What I did now is, when a user start the program, the serienumber of his PC is added to a database. So if 7 users are working in the program, 7 records
of serienumbers are in the database.
When someone update or change anything, the program set a logic field of that database to ON of all users.
In the program I have defined a timer that do a search in the database of it's serienumber, and if the field is ON, the screen will refresh, and put the
logic field of his serienr back OFF.
That is working very nice.

Now they want me to write another program to do some planning for truck-maintenance and I was wondering if there was an other (easyer) method to do
a refresh of the screens on the other PC?

Thanks
Marc

[anserkk]

Why don't you access a common dbf from both different module to check whether screen refresh is required or not

Regards

Anser

[Marc Vanzegbroeck]

Anser,

That's how it did is now with the database including de serialnumbers of the PC that opened the program. Than setting a logic field when refresh have to be done.
I was wondering that there was another way to do the update like sockets or something like that.

Regards,
Marc

[James Bott]

Marc,

>I was wondering that there was another way to do the update like sockets or something like that.

Not to my knowledge. I think the solution that you came up with is a good one.

Regards,
James

[Carlos Mora]

Hi Marc,

Hi,

So if 7 users are working in the program, 7 records
of serienumbers are in the database.
When someone update or change anything, the program set a logic field of that database to ON of all users.

To make this a little bit simpler, in place of use a logical ON/OFF you can use a numeric field with RELEASE info, so when someone updates increments that value.
Everyone has the release number being shown on browse, an if is different, has to make an update. In this way you don´t need a record for each user, just one for table.

Regards,

Carlos.

[Marc Vanzegbroeck]

Thanks Carlos,

That's a good idea. The only problem is when do I have to reset the counter, because after a while, there can be an overflow.
I could also combine date() and time(). But then all clocks of all PC's should be exact the same. Maybe I can combine date() + counter.

Regards,
Marc

[James Bott]

Marc,

I wonder if you can just automatically reset the counter when it reaches a certain number, and just check if the users counter is not equal to the current table counter (instead of less than). Then it doesn't matter what value the counter is, as long as it is different.

Regards,
James

[Carlos Mora]

Mark,

That's a good idea. The only problem is when do I have to reset the counter, because after a while, there can be an overflow.

As James said, you just have to check for changes. Is current value is different from the last registered an update should be done.
And... how many updates can be made in a single day? thinking in 3 per minute (1 every 20 seconds) that will be 4320 in the whole 24 hs of one day. Using a field numeric with 10 digits, gives you a frame of 2314814,8 days to overflow, that is 6337 years, so you can write a manual just in case you are not there to restart the counter

Regards,

Carlos.

[Marc Vanzegbroeck]

Carlos,

You are right. I beleave there will be an update of the program before running the program 6337years . I can automaticly reset the counter every update.

Regards,
Marc