>Hi Hugo
>
>The transaction is wrapped around assigning the record to a processor/dialer? That means the user takes possession of the record until something unassigns it? I'm wondering why not begin the transaction, permit edits and end the transaction. That way the transaction would vanish if the user disconnected, or the user would complete the work requiring the assignment.


Hi Mike,

There is no user input involved at this stage (in my case). Our system works like this, a user wants to send and repeat on schedule messages to the PA system, so they make a phone call some special numbers, there one application will answer the call and allow them to record the message and optionally they can ask this system to broadcast the message to all stations and all trains with all default values or just save the message (it is a menu driven application like "Press 7 to save the message... blah blah"). With the message saved if they did not choose to broadcast it using the previous application, then they can go to a webpage where they can fine-tune the options, for example select specific trains or stations, change the frequency and duration of the broadcast etc. In either case the metadata information (created by the user) is saved, and it there when a record is added to the Messages table, a trigger is fired to "Queue" the message, and this Queue is the one we are managing, so there is no user taking possession of any record at this point, furthermore there are no more updates to this queue record, as once a dialer takes possession of it the only use is to mark it as being handled (so no other dialer acts on it) and to retrieve the primary key of the Message to get the information required to broadcast (it will update other tables to show progress in some monitoring programs, but that is another story)

I am not sure if I am being clear but hope so :)