Family Historian User Group

My partner and I are often wishing that we could use the same file over our home network to update it.

We have tried, and we can both open and access and even update the file together. But there seems to be no integrity checking or record locking to prevent conflicts. Consequently the condition of the updates on save is not always as one would have liked.

To me, this multi-user capability would take the product forward massively.

In anticipation

ID:2433

To provide multi-user support, I suspect would take a complete re-write as FH currently loads the whole file into memory for editing.

On a local PC FH detects that a file has been changed and offers a re-load, which is how it works with gedcom census, but obviously if you are both editing at the same time you are going to lose changes.

Personally if you really need multi-user you might be better moving to phpgedview or similar which has web based editing.

Another option is to work on two copies of the file and use the merge option to apply changes from one file to the other.

The only remotely easy way to do the record locking (et al.) would be to lose the gedcom text file and move the data to a database )(e.g. Access). This would then let a lot of other features be added, but lose the essential benefit of a pure gedcom file.

This also won't solve the problem of people working e.g. on a laptop in a records office and then coming back to a desktop system without a lot of work.

I can't imagine this being much use to most of us, but I imagine a wish list entry would put that to the test.

My feeling is that FH should do what many other file based Windows applications do, namely to prevent you opening the same file twice so there's no expectation that your changes will be merged.