Secwin and NTWS. Your opinion?

[Neil Porter]

Is anyone using Secwin Access control successfully in a live environment?

I have one application that I have deployed using an MSSQL backend, and the In-Memory driver for the Secwin tables that are imported into the dictionary.

I'm a huge fan of the NTWS and I desperately want the Secwin integration to work, but I'm seeing all sorts of pretty random things happening. It seems to me as though changes that are being made to users, and permissions, just aren't reliably being saved. I can tick a few boxes to set access permissions, or even to assign a user to a group, and the next time I go back into that screen, those changes are lost, or worse, a different tick box to the one I selected is checked.

A week ago my users suddenly reported that they couldn't log into the system. Neither could I, even with the original default user. I couldn't reset passwords or anything. The only way I could get back into the system was to recover all of the sec win tables from a previous days backup.

Currently, I'm running with NT 6.51 and Secwin 6.27, so I can see there are some updates out there, but it's hard to find out if they will help in this case because the NT 6 history stops at version 6.47.

I'm thinking it's about time that I supported all of Bruce's hard work, and upgraded to NT 7 or even NT8 now, but I do need some form of reliable access control, and it would make me feel a lot happier if I knew there were other people out there that have managed to get it all working reliably, particularly with the MSSQL backend.

Regards,

Neil.

[rjmiller]

I am using them.  I have a very successful application done with CW7, NT6 and Secwin.

However I am currently experiencing difficulties with a new app using CW8, NT7 and Secwin.  Issues seem to be with secwin database but I am not really sure.  If you have a working system I would suggest staying with it for the time being.  I wish I had not done the upgrades I did and may have to move back in order for this new app to progress.

I will let you know if I make further progress.

  RJ

[Nick]

>I'm a huge fan of the NTWS and I desperately want the Secwin integration to work, but I'm seeing all sorts of pretty random things happening. It >seems to me as though changes that are being made to users, and permissions, just aren't reliably being saved. I can tick a few boxes to set >access permissions, or even to assign a user to a group, and the next time I go back into that screen, those changes are lost, or worse, a different >tick box to the one I selected is checked.


Same experience. But if you look at the examples it's pretty straightforward to code your own security system.
Takes a bit more time but in the end you save a lot of time by not chasing problems in code you didn't write.
Nick

[Bruce]

Hi Neil,

>> I'm a huge fan of the NTWS and I desperately want the Secwin integration to work, but I'm seeing all sorts of pretty random things happening. It seems to me as though changes that are being made to users, and permissions, just aren't reliably being saved. I can tick a few boxes to set access permissions, or even to assign a user to a group, and the next time I go back into that screen, those changes are lost, or worse, a different tick box to the one I selected is checked.

There's not a lot to go on here, but it is possible a later NetTalk may help. I'm guessing that the problem you're having is when things happen too quickly, over a slow connection. In other words the user does multiple interactions before the first one has completed. This may be the root of the weirdness.

I stress _may_ because it's literally impossible to be sure based on that report. I don't think the database writes themselves are flaky, which makes me wonder about the asynchronous stuff.

NT7 _may_ improve this, partially because there are things added there (under the skin) to try and reduce this sort of interaction problem. Obviously a lot of work has happened over the last 18 months or so, so there's a lot of subtle things different to NT6.

>>  the NT 6 history stops at version 6.47.

hmm - the NT6 history goes to 6.56 here
http://www.capesoft.com/docs/NetTalk6/NetTalkHistory.htm
and to 7.34 here
http://www.capesoft.com/docs/NetTalk7/NetTalkHistory.htm

Cheers
Bruce

[rjmiller]

Yes, Nick... I could code a basic security system... but I need the functionality of runtime access to screen, fields and menus I would be hard pressed to write myself.

  RJ

[Nick]

Hi Neil,

 >>I could code a basic security system... but I need the functionality of runtime access to screen, fields and menus I would be hard pressed to write myself.

You can test almost all fields, menus, etc. against a value that you set at login-time.
You can use the "must login type" or the condition for hiding.
A hide condition can be as simple as < p_web.GSV(level).

IMO the real work is setting up the system and rethink how it has to work in your situation.
After you can set the access level/value for certain parts of your app for each user the testing at field and menu level is the easy part.
Just a matter of setting the right session values at login and test for these values whereever you need to.

Nick