>I have a business with 4 staff members that utilize a laptop on the road most of the time but come into the office during the week, and 3 staff members that utilize desktops all the time. Up until now, each laptop has the same foxpro application for storing patient information, but each laptop ends up with different information since each staff member works on different patients and therefore enters different information.
>
>I have done some reading and it looks like the best way to solve this problem is having each staff member utilize the same database information from the desktops, and store a portion of the information on an offline views so they will utilize this information while out of the office. Once they come back to the office, they can go "online" and update the tables in the database.
>
>My questions are twofold:
>1. does anyone have a different idea on how best to solve my problem?
>2. is there a way to avoid the innevitable update conflicts when the laptops go online? What I have found is that if the information changes on the office database after the person takes the information in the offline view format, when they go back online with their own changes, there always seems to be a conflict. Does anyone have any advice on this?
>
>Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I am learning a lot more about foxpro but am still at the beginner level. Thanks.
>
>Paul

I can think of two approaches:
1. For those tables on the laptop that can be changed you add another field that records the update/insertion.
2. Or, if those tables that can be modified have a field that contains a date & time stamp – then you only need to record exactly when the last synchronization occurred. Selecting rows (updated or inserted) subsequent to the last synchronization should be trivial.

Once the laptop updates have been transferred to the desktop system - I would ditch the laptop copy, until they want to go on the road again, at that time the desktop database should be copied back to the laptops.

This might be easier to implement if the application has an easy mechanism to facilitate switching between a local database (say on the C drive) and a server based database (obviously on a server).