Web Publishing with PHP and FileMaker 9- P17:On the other hand, it would drive me nuts if you bought this book only to discover that it didn’t address your needs. In the spirit of customer satisfaction, please read the following introduction to get a sense of where I’m coming from, and whether you might get some good use out of this book. | 230 APPENDIX C Error Handling and Prevention By the same token and arguably worse a record that was loaded into the browser by Erica at 9 01 . could be edited by Sharon one second later. If Erica then edits the record that is loaded in her browser but is now different than the version in the database and submits it to the database Sharon s changes will be completely overwritten by Erica s. It is outside the scope of this book to do justice to roll-your-own record-locking solutions but I will say that FileMaker provides the tools that you need with the getModificationId method of the record object. In a nutshell the solution is this When Erica loads a record into the browser the modid is loaded along with it. If Sharon then edits the record the modid in the database will be incremented. Then when Erica goes to submit her changes to the database the modid from the browser is first checked against the modid in the database. If they differ it means that someone else edited the record while Erica was lollygagging so she s going to have to reload the record and reedit it. Summary Bugs are going to happen and errors are going to occur. Being aware of the typical issues covers about 80 of your bases. Knowing where to look makes the remaining 20 a lot easier to manage. If you remember to consider your web application from a multiuser perspective and you are familiar with techniques to handle the volatile FileMaker Pro development environment you will be able to quickly build and successfully maintain web applications that are flexible powerful useful and reasonably responsive. Your superhero cape is ready what are you waiting for APPENDIX D FileMaker PHP API Reference This appendix is a chart of the methods that make up . The first column is the class name the second column is the method and the third column is what you can expect the method to return when you execute it. The entries in the second column are called the prototypes of the methods. A prototype
