Best practice for limiting login to app?

[Ronald S. Cook]

I have a Win app wherein users login via my interface (i.e. not via NT
Authentication). Since the User Names are like "Driver 1, Driver 2, etc.,
sometimes Driver 1 might accidentally login as Driver 2. There's also a
Truck selection where drivers are supposed to select the truck that they're
actually in (but sometimes they screw up).

My main concern is not allowinging the same user name or truck number to be
used by more than one driver. I could put a bit column "IsLoggedIn" in
tblUser and tblTruck, but unless they specifically click a "logout" button
to reset, I don't know how I can maintain that setting correctly.

Any ideas, best practices, or other?

Thanks,
Ron

[Michael Bray]

"Ronald S. Cook" <rc***@westinis.comwrote in news:OHrbMKWvGHA.1284
@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl:

Any ideas, best practices, or other?

I assume you are worried if they exit the program without logging out...
solution would be to Log them out when you exit the program, and not worry
about forcing them to click a 'Log Out' button.

-mdb

[s]

I assume you are worried if they exit the program without logging out...

solution would be to Log them out when you exit the program, and not worry
about forcing them to click a 'Log Out' button.

Come on...
What if machine got restarted? Or application got freezed?
The only way I see is to make a timestamp column ( sort of a lock ) in
database which would be updated after some time [ app would do it EVEN
if
the user is non active ] , e.g. 15 or 30 seconds. If application or
machine
get freezed or restarted, next user which will try to log in , will
make the
application check for the timestamp. If it will be older than last
possible
time of update, it would mean that the user CAN log in. Of course, if
application get closed normally, it should remove lock.
Question remains: how to get a representative time... I guess the best
place
is database server - both timestamp and time to check up to should be
taken
from that machine...
cheers!
SlawekG