another multi-user "solution"?

[Kurt Kaufman]

RC wrote:

> Question:
>
> How do changes on individual cards in different copies of a stack in 
> each
> user's RAM get made to the copy resident on disk?  There is not, to my
> knowledge, a way to save changes on one card of a stack without 
> overwriting
> the entire stack.  So if I open a stack before you, Jacque, and Kurt 
> do,
> wait until you all close the stack, and then save it, the only changes 
> to
> the original stack will be mine.

Kurt:
I'm actually concerned about two things here.
The first is that the single (standalone) stack being used now contains 
about 900 record cards, and is about 13 MB in size.  I'm concerned that 
it might gradually become unwieldy during saves.  It already takes an 
unacceptable amount of time to save over the Windows network.  I'd also 
rather separate the app and the data so that if something goes wrong, 
the data is still relatively easily accessible.

The second is that by dividing the records, the only restrictions are 
that no more than one user can work on a single record at a time, all 
the others being available. I initially thought that the individual 
records could be stacks, but ended up using text files instead for the 
ability to manually edit if needed.  I've got it working (with "busy" 
marker files); now I have to test it on the real network (as opposed to 
my Mac with VPC at home).

I will keep in mind the folder limits of the OS (in this case Win XP 
Pro):
-Appears to be 65,534 [combined folders/files] per folder on FAT32; and 
4,294,967,295 per volume [no folder limit specified] on NTFS; however 
the practical limits would be slightly lower ;-)

-Kurt