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1: Multiple authors editing one sequence - can we prevent simultaneous edits?
06/04/13 08:35 PM
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We have a number of people working on a series of sequences, and have run into problems where two people are editing the same sequence at the same time. Therefore, one person ends up over writing the work of the other.

Is it possible to lock a sequence once someone has opened it for editing? Or notify subsequent authors that someone has already opened the sequence for editing?

We are using LAMS 2.4 integrated with Blackboard.

Posted by Ariane Blanch

2: Re: Multiple authors editing one sequence - can we prevent simultaneous edits?
In response to 1 06/05/13 04:19 AM
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Hi Ariane,

We've thought quite hard about this one when we created the My Groups and Public folders.

The idea to "lock a sequence" while a user was using it sounded very appealing. But then we encounter that if the user just left his computer open or he just closed the computer, the lock on the sequence would continue indefinite and that caused a major headache to all parties involved.

Notifying that other person is editing it, it's similar to locking as the usual behaviour of other editors was to wait for the first editor to finish and they might be waiting for a long time.

Therefore what we thought was the best approach is to have three main folders: Each user private folder, the My Groups folder and the Share all, fully open "Public" folder.

In your private folder you share nothing, therefore you can make sure that the changes you do are just done by you.

On the My Groups and Public, other can also edit your sequence and overwrite them if they save them last.

So my suggestion would be to ask your teachers to make a copy of the sequence they want to edit to their private folder and then edit the private copy. When they are ready to share back, they can move it to the My Groups folder slightly changing the sequence name to let other note that this is their contribution to it.

This way is actually best as you can have some sort of versioning of the original sequence.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

3: Re: Re: Multiple authors editing one sequence - can we prevent simultaneous edits?
In response to 2 06/10/13 08:16 PM
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Hi Ernie,

Your suggestion is, unfortunately, not going to work in this circumstance. We have several people needing to edit sequences in 2 separate group folders, each with 13 sequences. Multiple versions would very rapidly become unwieldy.

Further, it doesn't actually prevent the problem, it just means we potentially end up with divergent versions, and someone still has to repeat their work to combine the versions together.

It would be excellent if file locking could be turned on or off, because while I can fully appreciate that in many circumstances, the issue of people leaving files open is the most significant, in situations where there is intensive editing being done by several people, it's much easier to manage the problem of left open files than to deal with the constant threat of over writing each other's work, or simultaneously working on the same file in different people's personal folders and then needing to redo the work of at least one of them.

We are having to implement a process of notifications when we are editing files, which is certainly less than ideal.

Thanks,
Ariane

Posted by Ariane Blanch

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