In my opinion, record locking strategies don't play well with n-tier architectures. This is just one of the issues involved. Generally speaking, a pure n-tier model should be able to work in a fully disconnected fashion. In this case, all you can ask the BO or data tier (whether you have those separated or not) is to know if it was succesful or not, and why. If some problem like this arise, you should just retry the whole operation from the UI.
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>Can you give me an idea about how your tiers are separated?

Just logically. I started out using the BOs from West Wind so the business logic and data handling are mixed together. I don't put any UI in them. The only direct data my forms deal with are through views for the display grids. Other than that, they all talk straight to the BOs. They're all in the same exe, though.

I usually do retry the whole operation, but there's been a few cases here and there, like the record locking issue, where it would be nice to give the user a chance to just retry that line rather than retry _everything_, especially since some of the operations are complicated and time consuming. So I was wondering if there was some way to throw the error up to the UI, have it talk to the user, and and pass the answer back down so the BO knows how to procede.

Thanks,

Michelle