Mark,

>When I first read Cooper, I agreed. Then, in a discussion on another network :), someone (it may even have been Jim Booth) mentioned the case where, in a multiuser app, a user makes a change to a record and wants to go out to lunch. She wants her change applied, but without an explicit save command, she'd have to realize that to save the record, she has to navigate away from it, or close the form.

What's the problem with that ? When he or she comes back again. she could still save the record. With row or table buffering the program should not hold record locks. An other approach is to fire a automatic save mode after some minutes (like wordprocessors) or display after some minutes a warning ("These changes have not been saved yet, do you want to save them ?").

This seems to me to be just the kind of thing that Cooper argues against: forcing the user to understand the implementation of the program.

Cooper is just telling us to crawl in the user mind, and learn how users look at the problem.