The second part of my article on record locking using CF 7 went live yesterday at Community MX. I saw some applications using Flex and the record locking capabilities and decided it was something I wanted to do with a regular CF application. Where I work we have quite a few simultaneous users who access job records -- one person will create the record, but then in the span of a few hours several others have to update the records with information. This was the perfect place to put the theory to work. Basically, an array is created in application scope that contains stucts with record ids and user ids. If a user is logged in and attempts to update a record that has a lock on it, it will be viewable only. The locks have a user-defined time limit on them not related to sessions, and a user can only lock one record at a time. Because the locking is done at the application level rather than at the database level, the lock can span multiple tables and update statements that pertain to one record id.

The first part sets up the sample data and the pages, and the second part shows all the locking functionality. The articles are free for members and a small fee for non-members.

Implementing a Record Locking System in ColdFusion 7 - Part 1
Implementing a Record Locking System in ColdFusion 7 - Part 2