simultaneous access to flat file

[Frank]

Hello all,
I have to access a flat file (.txt or something) by two applications at the
same time. For reading and writing. Is that possible and how?
Thanks
Frank

 

[Frank]

I thought of something. Is it possible with an XML file?
Frank

 

[Samuel R. Neff]

A text file should be fine, if both processes open it with shared
write access (or read/write) then they can both write to it (or read).
If it's a simple file like a log file then it should be ok but you
could get occasional hiccups where text from one write is in the
middle of another unless you use some type of cross process
synchronization (i.e., Mutex).

XML is different though.. because XML has to be well formed it would
be very difficult to have to applications both write to the same file
and ensure that the resulting file is still well-formed after every
write. You'd need to synchronize the processes and whenever one wrote
to the file it triggered the other to read the changes and sync it's
internal structure. It'd be far more reliable to have only one of the
processes actually read/write the file and the second process can
communicate back with the first to interact with it (Remoting).

HTH,

Sam


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