This is the start of several articles about the “record has been updated by another user” exception.

This exception has an interesting piece of architecture behind it.

Over time most support desks will have a call from a frustrated user that they have experienced a BMXAA8229W error and lost their work. The worst I have encountered was a user who had patiently spent an hour adding labour transactions and then lost them to a record update error.

[17/02/17 08:45:37:984 GMT] 00000059 SystemOut     O 23 Nov 2016 07:52:37:984 [ERROR] [UI1] [] BMXAA8229W - Record MAXSESSION : MAXSESSIONUID=25,134 has been updated by another user. Your changes have not been saved. Refresh the record and try again.

psdi.util.MXRowUpdateException: BMXAA8229W - Record MAXSESSION :  MAXSESSIONUID=25,134 has been updated by another user. Your changes have not been saved. Refresh the record and try again.

This article will explain why this exception occurs.

This post refers to entries in the SystemOut.log /

How Maximo identifies if a record has changed

Each data table (e.g. workorder) has a ROWSTAMP column on it. Each table also has a trigger on it which is fired when a row is inserted or updated.

When a record is saved the database trigger is fired. This trigger updates the ROWSTAMP value to the next value in a sequence.

So what triggers the update error?

This simplified diagram illustrates why the record update error occurs.

In this example a different user generated the error. In the next articles I will explain how Maximo 7.6 has changed to reduce the frequency of these errors and why these errors can be seen even if there are no users on the system.

This blog series

This article is one of a series of articles to help system administrators understand the Maximo logs and the underlying architecture. If you are enjoying these then I run a one day course on log analysis.

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