Field Locking
As soon as you make any change to a the contents of a field or
relation, it is locked, so that nobody else can work on it while you
are making your changes. You will see that a
appears next to the field/relation title. The
field is now locked until you save your changes. A similar icon will
appear in every field/relation you modify. When you save the content
item, you will see that all these icons disappear, indicating that you
are no longer editing any of the content item's fields or relations,
and they are therefore not locked.
You can release your lock on on a field or
relation by right-clicking on the
icon and selecting Release
lock from the displayed menu. Note, however, that doing
this will revert the changes you made to the field. If you want to
keep your changes you should save them instead; this will also release
the lock.
If you see a
icon next to a field or relation title, it means
that one of your colleagues is currently working it, and it is
therefore locked. You will not be able to make any changes. If you
hold your mouse pointer over the lock icon, the name of the person who
has locked the field will be displayed. Once the person finishes their
editing, the lock icon will disappear and you can start editing.
Occasionally, situations can arise where locks are not released properly - even though a person has finished editing a field, their lock is not released, meaning that you cannot get on with your work. This usually occurs as a result of network problems. If this situation arises, you can get around it by "stealing" the lock. To do this, right-click on the lock icon and select Steal lock from the displayed menu.
You should only use the Steal lock function to escape from situations where a lock has not been properly released. Stealing a lock from somebody who is actually working on a field or relation is very disruptive. If a field you need to work on is locked, first contact the person who has locked it and agree with them how to resolve the situation. It may simply be that they have moved on to something else and forgotten to save their changes.
If somebody steals your lock while you are working on a field or relation you will see a dialog something like this:
If this happens and you want to save the changes you have made, copy the content of the field from the dialog, paste it into another editor and save it there. When you recover access to the field, you can copy your saved content back into the field. Note, however, that the user who stole your lock has presumably also made changes to the field. If you simply paste your content back into the field it will overwrite his/her changes. You may therefore need to find out what changes the other user made and carefully merge the two sets of changes.