On Mon, 5 Apr 1999, Scott Johnson wrote:
> Hal DeVore wrote:
> > As long as we're being devil's advocates: conduits that pop up
> > dialogs are a Very Bad Thing if you're doing a Network Hotsync.
> > That dialog might be on a different continent.
>
> Bingo -- it could be a 3Com Network HotSync, or one of the 3rd party
> multi user sync products, or maybe the Palm user won't even be around
> when the sync happens. Say they were issued a random organizer in the
> morning, and they return it at the end of the day and go home. There's
> a whole separate department of people who hand out the organizers and
> simply shove them into cradles when they get returned.
>
> This latter scenario >really< tightens things, it means the user can't
> be permitted to leave unfinished records in any "limbo" or "scratch"
> database waiting for the "next time" they run the app, because there
> won't be any next time. So the application interface really needs to
> enforce all needed validation at record entry time.
Or else the conduit would have to put them into a holding database on the
desktop that squirts them back out to a _separate_ application for
"repair"/completion at a later time, either on a handheld or from the
desktop. (Oddly enough, I seem to recall that the census actually works in
that manner.)
I mention this because preventing folks from creating records that are
missing data may lead to scribbled post-it notes (or, a bit better, Memo
Pad entries) containing freeform record data that they were unable to
complete.
Put another way: send complete records to the brain-damaged SQL server,
and send incomplete records to a human (maybe not the same human who wrote
the record in the first place) for completion.
--
Kenneth Albanowski ([EMAIL PROTECTED], CIS: 70705,126)
