Using the program with multiple computers

[isismarina]

Hi,

I work at an office and we would like to use your program to loan out DVDs to our employees. I see that there is a way to back up and put the library on multiple computers, although is there anyway to log in as a user and see the most up to date info? For example, there are different people at the office all the time, and it would be great if someone could loan a DVD out on their computer, and that we would all get the most up to date info on our computers if we are all logged in as the same user.

Thanks,
Isis

[Conor]

You can share your library to several computers by mounting the server as a hard drive on all of them. Depending on your file system on the computers you will be able to make change simultaneously and the results will be merged into the database. If you find that one of your Pedias locks up while trying to make simultaneous changes it means that the file systems are not compatible (a PowerPC and an Intel for example). What happens is one of them locks the entire file and the other Pedia is locked up waiting for it to release it to write its changes, of course the other program won't release it until it quits. If this is the case you can designate one version as the editor and the rest use as browse only.

You can also use Dropbox to share the data folder, and Dropbox will take care of keeping the file updated as long as changes don't happen simultaneously on two computers.

All this amazing technology of merging and writing to the same file concurrently is handled by Core Data an Apple technology. Personally concurrent access makes me nervous so be sure to backup your database folder often. With a backup available go ahead and give it a trial setup. You will also find that there is a lot of caching going on (speed reasons), so even though both programs can write to the file simultaneously you might not see the changes appear on another running copy due to caching even though the changes will appear once the program is restarted or it decides to refresh the information from disk.

Our licenses are family licenses so go ahead and install the Pedias all over your house, thank you for asking.

[mattearwicker]

Does this not work any more? I have copied the file Database.bookpd from ~/Library/Application Support/Bookpedia to /Dropbox/Applications/Bookpedia/ but when I open it from there, it copies the file back to the original location and uses that instead. All updates are made to the local version only. Is this because I am using the App Store version (with sandboxing)?

Matt

[Conor]

you can still move your data folder and share it among computers. You need to copy the entire data folder from the application support and not just the database file. The images are in the "Covers" folder and the program looks for this file. When you double click the file and sees the file on it's own it brings it into the current data folder. So copy /Dropbox/Applications/Bookpedia/ folder and you should be good to go. We have avoided being sandboxed in the App Store for now. Hopefully, this will still be possible once the app needs to be sandboxed.