Prevent user opening multiple sessions on the same pc

[staggman]

Hi,

I am new to LAMP and I am building a webapp to support a contact center and I'm running into problems handling data capture.

 

The system is meant to control the flow of contact information to agents and to track outcomes of the work they do.

 

It needs to capture which record was presented to which agent when, how long they were dealing with it and what the outcome was.

 

I have been able to build the interface and the interaction with the database is fine, in a test environment I am able to "close the loop" on all the data but I am running into problems with the following.

 

1. An agent closes the browser in error before he/she has reported the outcome of a particular record on which contact was attempted. - This is a problem because while I can force the agent back to that record to demand an outcome, I can only record when I forced him to (potentially) guess what the outcome was and what was guessed, not what definitively happened and when. This will render a lot of the reporting that I'm trying to get going less accurate. I appreciate that there is a certain inevitability to this problem, network loss, yanked the power cord etc can all cause the stateless to vanish, but I wondered if anyone else had come accross anything that might help me to maximise the integrity of my data.

 

2. An agent opens another instance of the webapp on the same computer and is therefore able to view multiple records at the same time. This means that the data will appear to show them viewing two records at the same time. I initally handled this by using a logon flag on the database to prevent any other sessions being opened but the usergroup is saying that's too much of a pain to administer (forever logging people out.) As a result I've been looking at trying to track an individual browser session on the user's record in the database: everytime they login that becomes the latest session and all others become null and thrown out when they request a new screen by code at the start of each script, this works fine to stop multiple logins at multiple locations by tracking the IP address (we're on a single site and this isn't public facing) but isn't working for multiple sessions on the same machine.

 

Any help you can give will be much appreciated.