Edit conflicts

Please note, Form Tools still does not support editing multiple submissions by the same user in multiple tabs. This is currently just the way that Form Tools is designed.

Form Tools 3.0.13 added a feature to resolve conflicts that may arise when editing form data. In most cases this is an unusual scenario, but with some installations that have multiple users simultaneously editing form submissions the probability of a conflict becomes a lot higher.

Scenario

Imagine two Form Tools users (admin or client) happen to be editing the same submission at the same time. When the second user submits the form data, the original values they had seen in their page could have changed. So without knowing it, they may accidentally override values that had just been updated by a second user.

What Form Tools does is whenever a user starts editing a submission, it tracks the original field values for whatever fields are in their particular View. When the user submits the form, it examines the latest fresh data in the database and if any of the fields that the user just changed have also changed in the database, it presents them with a page like in the screenshot to here. For all conflicting fields, the user is shown the current value in the database (a value they haven't seen yet) and their own value. They can then choose which value to keep.

A few subtleties to know about

• When a user sees this resolve conflicts page, any field value that wasn't in conflict from their last form submission will have been updated in the database.
• If the user navigates away from the conflict resolution page, the database won't be updated with their new values: they have to explicitly choose their own values here to update the database.
• The only exception to this conflict resolution is files. Files are currently always updated in the database from each submission even in the case of a conflict.
• The conflict resolution page will also appear if the form submission data had been updated through other means besides just another Form Tools user editing the data (e.g. manual changes to the database, or via the API).