Hi,

Can somebody shine some help on this issue - Im totally confused!!!

I am to construct a distributed application that will have many clients
at various locations on the same LAN. I need to create a mechanism by
which object alterations made by 1 client are recognised by another
client. My immediate reaction to this as a solution was to look at
remoting. Is this a good approach?

Secondly, I thought of using a server object to create business objects
and then return them to clients as and when requested - so that the
client can manipulate the data and then persist it back into the
database when required. My next question is what is the best approach
to do so (if I were to use remoting). I'm not sure whether to host all
business objects on the server and return references to them, or,
instead to return copies of the business objects that the client can
then manipulate before saving... Speaking of saving the data, can
anybody offer a suggestion as to the best approach to save the data in
a business object (such as a 'purchase order' (which may have multiple
transaction objects within it)). Should I create one database
connection in the server object and when a business object is requested
from the server the server issues a database connection to it (before
it is returned to the client (by either value or reference)). Or,
should I have the client create it's own connection and pass that to
the business object (once on the client side - if using 'by value') and
attempt to use this to execute SQL/stored procedures to commit the
data. Or, should I keep all the business objects within a client object
which is then accessed (on a user's machine not on a remote system)
whenever a request is made to the client...

e.g.

clientInstance.GetPurchaseOrder(123);

The only issue I have with this is that to populate a purchase order at
the client side I will need to query several tables (from different
locations) and return mutliple data tables into a data set. I wonder
whether it would be more efficient to build the business object (i.e.
purchase order) on the server and return it fully populated, rather
than having to return the dataset (which I suspect may be larger in
size) and then use it to populate a business object on the client
side).... I am soo confusssseeed... If i did build the business object
within the confines of a client object (on a client pc) I would still
need to manually create a unique primary key (at the server) that
represents the purchase order number (as this has to adhere to a
predefined format) - in which case I would be going to the server for
this as this has to be unique to all clients and therefore cannot be
created by the client. In which case I only appear to be using the
server to get an order number and register other clients (so that they
can be notified of updates)...


Please help a newbie... :-)

Many thanks,

Craig.