Lock application for use by one user at a time

[UnglueD]

Hello.

I recently wrote an application that reads from a database and calls
a webservice to output an xml file to an FTP directory. I published
this application so that a couple of people in my department could use
it.

However, I now run into the problem where 2 or more people might use
the application at a time. What I need to know is how to lock down the
application so that it can only be used by one person at a time.
However since the application is run on 3 different machines the
solution is blurry to me.

Maybe there is a to limit connections to the database for a given
user? This application uses a specific username in its connection
string. Am I headed in the right direction with this?

Thanks In Advance

 

[Chris Fulstow]

If you're using a membership provider for authentication then maybe you
could use the Membership.GetNumberOfUsersOnline() method, and only one
user at a time to login?

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.security.membership.getnumberofusersonline.aspx

A better solution might be to queue up requests for your web service
and process them sequentially.

 

[John Timney \(MVP\)]

Sounds like you have a design problem here that you ned to fix rather than
looking to impose a restriction. Thousands of users should be able to use
your asp.net app at the same time, so perhaps your webservice is performing
the wrong task. Why dont you think about having the users pull the data
from the asp.net cache, or simply from a shared file so they can all read
the data, and if the cache values have expired or the file has gone out of
date you update the file using the next request. You could actually create
a service that updates the file and only ever have the users read from it if
that helped.

--
Regards

John Timney (MVP)
VISIT MY WEBSITE:
http://www.johntimney.com