Hi @Garak 

MWO (Mobile Work Order) locks the work order when it is on the mobile.  This would be a weird usage, but it might be a solution for you.

You could come up with a complex system of custom events that would prevent edits by anyone except someone named in e.g. the Prepared By field.

Not on Apps10 @paul harland

I guess you could add an 'editor' field where the user can enter their user ID and then lock the WO from editing for everyone else using an event. 

@anmise if we went down that route, are there any events that could be tapped into to auto-unlock the WO from editing once the “planner” navigated away from the WO, or would it have to be a manual remove-name-save to release from being “locked”?

I’m just thinking of the scenarios where the person might forget to manually remove their name or called away etc.

On this note, would it also be possible to on WO load, if the user is in a given permission set, it auto-puts their name into the “editor” field and thus locking, or would it only be able to be a manual entry field?

Nothing out of the box since you are adding something new. Perhaps you could setup a scheduled migration job to clear the field if the WO hasn't been updated in X minutes or add the logic in the custom event e.g. If locked_by is not null and modified_date <sysdate - 600/84600 etc... 

Can you please describe in more detail why this is needed? It's bound to cause more harm than good to be honest. 

Our planners had a scenario recently where 2 people were in a WO trying to Prepare it as they didn’t know they were both in there which caused some confusion and double up of planner time.

The team feels that having to change each WO to “Under Preparation” to indicate its being prepared, and then to “Released” once ready is too much manual work and wanted to know whether an automatic lock/unlock was possible to eliminate the confusion and double up and reduce some manual clicking (we do have a fair few PMs and fault reports that generate daily).

Ok, so maybe just utilise the ‘Prepare By’ field. From the PMs that can be set automatically if you know who is preparing it up front and for the rest just introduce a process whereby the users have to set this value to indicate that it’s under preparation. If you want to make it a one-click (two really) process you could add a custom menu e.g. ‘Take Ownership’/’Start Planning’ which automatically sets the Prepared By to the user executing it (and possibly sets it to Under Preparation just to indicate to others that it’s actually ‘taken’). 

Then tell the users that if ‘Prepare By’ is blank, it’s fair game. If they are working from an overview to select WOs to prepare, add Conditional Formatting to highlight lines where ‘Prepared By’ is blank in green or something.

I think adding a true lock will just cause more work for everyone and you’ll end up turning it off within a couple of weeks anyway.

Thanks for your responses @anmise. I have similar concerns to what you’ve outlined with implementing a record lock, but good to know there are some options if we have to. Cheers :)