I have got a business logic update conflict handler working, but I have had to work round what appears to be a bug.
Please can someone confirm if this is indeed a bug – and if it is a known bug?
My conflict handler needs to take some columns from the publisher row and some from the subscriber row in the event of conflict.
I can quite happily generate a custom dataset which contains the winning row that I want – I can see that because I can step through the conflict handler with debug when a conflict occurs.
However, just returning ActionOnUpdateConflict.AcceptCustomConflictData from the UpdateConflictsHandler method does not set the publisher and subscriber columns correctly. I end up with different values on the two databases.
I have found that the only way to get the correct rows on both publisher and subscriber is to create a new ADO connection to the publisher and actually perform an update – updating all the modified columns. This now works reliably in my testing.
Fortunately, due to business rules the frequency of update conflicts are likely to be very infrequent, but I would very much like to avoid having to do the ‘unnecessary’ update.
Notes:
- I am using column level tracking – but I have seen the problem with row level tracking too
- I have mainly been using SP1 but have repeated the test on a configuration using the SP2 CTP – and the problem occurs there too
- The problem is not due to complex logic in my code. If the method just sets customDataSet = publisherDataSet.Copy and then returns ActionOnUpdateConflict.AcceptCustomConflictData, the changed and winning publisher values are not sent to the subscriber
Any thoughts would be much appreciated