Best Practice to handle items modification in SharePoint 2007

Question

From my understanding, there is no checkout function inside a SharePoint 2007 List.

So, what is the best practice that SharePoint Professionals and Expert do to make sure that a item of a SharePoint 2007 List is not modify concurrently? (meaning that there are two person who is perform modification to the item and only the last modification is apply to the item)

Answer 1

There isn't checkout on SharePoint lists (there is on document libraries) - SharePoint uses optimistic concurrency rather than pessimistic concurrency - e.g.

• User A opens up edit form and starts editing
• User B opens up ...
• User A saves
• User B clicks save but SP warns them that the data has changed since they started editing and will make the user B view User A's changes and re-enter.

For most use cases this is sufficient as an edit on a list item will generally be started and completed pretty quickly (as opposed to a document that could be being edited for hours or days) so the chance of this occurring is small.

Can I ask what use case and load that you're expecting this to be a problem for? Is this actually causing a problem now or are you perhaps over engineering? (no offence intended)