Hi Richard,

In the 2.0 .NET Membership API there is a feature to get the number of users online. I have implemented this in the 2.1 branch but I haven't yet built the control to show it.

I know you are running on mono so the 2.1 branch of mojoportal is not an option for you yet but its just a matter of time until the mono 2.0 stack will work with mojoportal.

The way the Membership one works is based on a window of time since the last user activity. I think by default if the user has been active within the last 20 minutes he is considered "online", after that he is not until his next web request. So to make this work I had to implement a user property for lastactivitydate and on every page request if the user is authenticated update his lastactivitydate to now.

To do what you are saying, keeping track of what module they are in would mean more points of logging and more data to log. Since the web is stateless you never really know if the user is in the module, you only know he has been in the module within the recent time period you define.

A more simple approach to solve the problem might be something like create a module to enter and update an Admin Message and configure whether the admin message is active. Then you place a control in the header of your skin that when the Admin message is active it always displays in the header of every page. Your message can be I need to restart the app at x o clock please save your work and logout of the system. You might want to do an ajax control so it works even if the user is just sitting there not doing any activity but looking at the page for a long time. The control can make requests to check if the message is active and update it on the page.

Fod for thought anyway.

Cheers,

Joe

Hi Richard,

Yes mono releases have been bumpy to say the least. I think the best thing if you have a beefy developer machine with maybe a nice big external drive is get the free version of VMWare Server and install a virtual machine with your os and mono and your customized mojoportal and test upgrades on that before upgrading your production environment. Then if you encounter a problem on the vm you can post it on the mono dev list so they can fix it and make another release.

Of course the success of such an approach would depend on how much time you have to thoroughly test all the features on the vm for each upgrade. You might even expose it on the network to your users and let them QA test it before upgrading production then they have some ownership in blessing the upgrade. Just depends on your organisation and how much leverage you have to get their cooperation.

Cheers,

Joe