Foundry Workshop - Prevent duplicate data entry

Question

I am building a Workshop App which will be used for data entry by a large number of operational staff members (> 200). I would like to implement the following set-up:

The staff will enter the data on existing Ontology Objects. To facilitate this, I embedded a Foundry Form into the Object View, and set-up a corresponding write-back data set.

1. The Ontology Objects in question will be displayed in an Object Table in Workshop.
2. The staff member will select an Object from the Object Table.
3. The selected Object will be opened in an Object View.
4. The staff member will enter data on the Object View (Foundry Form being displayed here).

I need to make sure that no concurrent data entry can/will happen. How can I achieve this? I am thinking about removing any Object which is opened in the Object View from the Object Table, but I am not sure if this is the best solution to the problem or how to achieve the removal from the table.

I am assuming that this must be a common problem and there would be a Design Pattern/Standard Functionality to solve this.

Answer 1

You'll have the best behavior here if you replace your Foundry Form with Foundry Actions. These actions are defined in the Ontology Management App and provide a more robust security model for managing object edits and are more tightly integrated into the various object-layer tools in Foundry.

Then in your Object View, rather than using the Foundry Forms widget, choose to create a new "Workshop-backed" Object View tab - this option is under the dropdown next to the New Tab button - and within the Workshop module use the Inline Action Form to embed the action form that you've configured in the Ontology Management App, supplying the variable representing the current object as the default for the object parameter in the Action.

With regards to simultaneous edits, in Actions, when the form is populated (i.e. when that tab is opened), the version of the underlying object(s) are registered. When the edit request is submitted, the current version of the object is checked, and if the version is different (i.e. there have been edits applied since the form was loaded) the user will be presented with message to the effect that the object has been updated and the edits will not be applied.

This protects against the case of a user overwriting a near-simultaneous edit without reviewing the changes first and does so at the writeback layer, rather than with logic in your application front-end.

There is not currently an approach to reflect real-time user interaction between two Workshop sessions. For instance, there is no way for the session of User A to "know" that User B has opened Object X in their session and is making a change.

If you wanted to do something for a bit of convenience or display signaling, you could create a small object type related to your main object - something like "Edit Lock" that looks like:

| id | primary_object_id | user_id | timestamp | timeout

And then in your Workshop app, there's a button above the table that says "Edit Selected Object".

When you click this button, you trigger an Action to create a new "edit lock" object populated with the current user and the current timestamp and say a timeout of 15 minutes from now.

Then in the object view for the primary object in question, on the same tab where you have the edit form embedded, you can create a variable that gets the edit locks associated with that object via a search around and use a Function to create a boolean variable if there is an "active" edit lock. And use this to conditionally show a banner to the user or otherwise give them a visual indication that another user has indicated they're making changes.

This won't push to the other session, and it'd be just for display purposes, the real protection still comes from the underlying object versioning that Actions enforces, but it might be a nice user affordance to layer on top if you really expect to commonly run into this situation.