Secured apps with smart minimizing.

[David D Webb]

We have a medical app that requires a user to log in every time they use the
app. For HIPAA compliance, all data is encrypted, the user must log in with
a personal account and pw, and if the app is left idle for X minutes, it
will automatically log the user out.

Up until this point, we have skipped the whole smart-minimize thing and just
shut down the app when they close it. With Windows Mobile 5.0, the load
times are starting to get rediculously long, so I am looking at using
smart-minimizing. There are 2 main problems to this.

1) There is NO minimize event. What the ??? I found some code snippets
that used the deactivate event to detect the minimizing, but they no longer
work in MW5. If I can detect this, I can set a global flag, and have this
checked in the form's activate event.

2) When the user restarts the application, it just activates the last active
form. Again, there is no un-minimize event or start event or anything, just
activate (which is useless if I can't tell what activated it). I need some
way to throw up the login form when they come back. If I could detect this,
I could open a login form when they came back.

Any suggestions??


Thanks,
Dave

 

[Alex Yakhnin]

Have you tried Form's Activate/Deactivate events?

 

[David D Webb]

Yes, but you can't tell the difference between a normal Activate/Deactivate
and a minimize or restart app.

-Dave

 

[Paul G. Tobey [eMVP]]

Does that matter? Shouldn't it display the dialog iff the application has
been inactive for the time-out period? If the user pops up the calendar for
twenty seconds and then returns to the application, should that force a
re-login? If so, it seems like any Activate would trigger one.

Paul T.

 

[David D Webb]

But an Activate event happens when you first open the form, any time you
switch back and forth to it, or even after a message box popup. So it does
matter. The login box would only pop-up if they were inactive in the
application for say 60 minutes or if they manually exited the app, then
restarted it. I have the inactive part working, but I can't detect when
they have manually closed (smart-minimized) the app, then restarted it.

-Dave


"Paul G. Tobey [eMVP]" <p space tobey no spam AT no instrument no spam DOT
com> wrote in message news:[email protected]...

 

[Paul G. Tobey [eMVP]]

For case #1, when opening the form the first time, you *want* to do that, so
a flag set for 'first-entry' would take care of that. After that, you want
to wait for a time-out, no? Activate/Deactivate is irrelevant until the
time-out occurs and, when it does, you ask for the password on the next
Activate, whatever caused it.

Paul T.

But an Activate event happens when you first open the form, any time you
switch back and forth to it, or even after a message box popup. So it
does matter. The login box would only pop-up if they were inactive in the
application for say 60 minutes or if they manually exited the app, then
restarted it. I have the inactive part working, but I can't detect when
they have manually closed (smart-minimized) the app, then restarted it.

-Dave


"Paul G. Tobey [eMVP]" <p space tobey no spam AT no instrument no spam DOT
com> wrote in message news:[email protected]...

Does that matter? Shouldn't it display the dialog iff the application
has been inactive for the time-out period? If the user pops up the
calendar for twenty seconds and then returns to the application, should
that force a re-login? If so, it seems like any Activate would trigger
one.

Paul T.