Multi-User Support in Jot+ Notes 3.x

This article only covers Jot+ Notes 3.0.0 and later.

Jot+ Notes is designed as a single-user application, where a notefile can only be modified by a single user at any one time. Concurrent updates (multiple users editing the same notefile at the same time) are much more complicated to implement, introduce complexity to the user interface (what if two users want to change the same note?), and increases the risk of data corruption.

Jot+ Notes does provide some support for multi-user and networked environments:

File Locking

The simplest multi-user feature is file locking, which ensures that only one user can edit a notefile at any time: A user trying to open a locked notefile will only be able to view that notefile (read-only mode).

File locking is enabled by default as it is useful even in a single-user environment.

File Monitoring (new in 3.1.0)

A new feature in Jot+ Notes 3.1.0 is file monitoring, which is actually two features:

If the physical file is changed (by another user or Jot+ Notes session), Jot+ Notes will offer to re-load the file, keeping it up-to-date.
If the user wants to edit a notefile that is currently locked, Jot+ Notes will try and obtain the lock to give the user write access to the notefile.

In a multi-user environment, with many users viewing the same notefile, if one user changes the notefile, the others will be notified of those changes.