Managing concurrent access to a case

Improve efficiency of your business processes and ensure that users can bring a case to a successful resolution by setting a locking strategy for parent case types to reduce the risk of losing updates to cases that users make simultaneously.

For example, in an insurance claim review case, you can lock a case to ensure that the case can move to the next stage only after a customer service representative (CSR) provides all data necessary for a case resolution.

In most configurations, use the default locking strategy to preserve transaction integrity among cases. Without default locking, you can lose work when other users perform tasks such as bulk processing or escalation actions in a service-level agreement.

You can provide one user or multiple users with concurrent case access. To maintain transaction integrity in both parent and child cases, enable one user to make data updates. For example, the parent case can contain properties that count or total values in the child case. Locking both parent and child cases at the same time helps to keep the counts or totals in sync. If multiple users need to open and review cases simultaneously without updating the cases, allow multiple users to access a case.

Note: Only parent case types support this option.

1. In the navigation pane of App Studio, click Case types, and then click the case type that you want to open.
2. On the Settings tab, click Locking.
3. In the Access strategy to open and work on a case section, select one of the available locking strategies:

   Choices	Actions
   Only one user can access a case	Select Allow one user. Optional: To adjust the time-out to your needs, in the Time out value time-out duration mins. field, enter how many minutes a lock remains on a case. The default value is 30. Result: Your application locks the case for a time-out duration or until the user submits or closes the case.
   Multiple users can access a case simultaneously	Select Allow multiple users. Providing multiple users with access to a case is necessary if you want users to access cases offline. Result: Your application preserves the changes that the first concurrent user makes. All other users who work on the case receive notifications and must review the changes before they can submit any updates.

4. Click Save.

Result: The locking strategy applies to new and existing cases.What to do next: If you have different concurrent-access requirements for parent case descendants, override the locking strategy in the relevant child case types. For more information, see Overriding the locking strategy of a child case.