Managing updates for urn-based forms

kerplunk — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:07:36 GMT

I have a set of full-trust forms for which I need an efficient way to manage updates. Here is the setup. Source templates are stored on the server. Intranet users invoke a form instance from a browser by clicking a link that refers to the template by its urn (i.e. "IP.NewFromSolution("urn:foo:bar");"). The first time a user clicks such a link, the source (a collection of forms) is downloaded and installed locally. Now I'm looking at how best to manage the distribution of updates. This would be much easier if I had the option of using a certificate-based full-trust solution. Unfortunately, I can't do that here. I also can't reliably push updates to the client machines.

In this case I need to run a check on the collection when any of its forms is invoked. So far I have been leaning towards generating a manifest that records the form version number. I could then compare the manifest on the client with the one on the server to know if updates needed to be installed. I was wondering if anyone had ideas about a better way to handle this.

Cheers

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Managing updates for urn-based forms