Solution to lack of recording of personal computer characteristics that cause service failure of transaction processing systems (20-Jan-2010)

Solution to lack of recording of personal computer characteristics that cause service failure of transaction processing systems

A software facility is disclosed which allows a server transaction processing system to reuse already recorded sets of characteristics of a personal computer connected to a client transaction processing system.

    The disclosure concerns two transaction processing computer systems, one of these transaction processing computer systems acts as a server system to the other which acts as a client system.

A user of a personal computer can connect to the client system and is able to interact with it to execute a transaction. Such a transaction runs partly in the client system and partly in the server system.

    The client system handles communication with the personal computer as part of the transaction. The server system handles database access and logic specific to a class of transaction.

    The personal computer characteristics are required to be correctly related to a given personal computer user and to be associated with a transaction executed by the personal computer user. The process to obtain and associate the characteristics of a given personal computer must not overwhelm the processing capability of the transaction processing systems.

    For a transaction to be able to execute in either system, the personal computer must have its characteristics defined to the client transaction processing system. Such characteristics can include device features such as, for example, support of a keyboard that uses a particular specialized character set for a given national language, support of a keyboard that uses a particular specialized character set for a given programming language, size of screen area or operator selectable alternate screen area size.

    There can be many of these characteristics but a number of personal computers can have some characteristics the same. However not all personal computers need have the same characteristics.

    When the user of the personal computer first establishes communication with the client system, these characteristics are obtained from a communication exchange between the personal computer and the client system. On completion of this process the characteristics are recorded in the client system as a particular set of characteristics and this set is then associated with the specific instance of the personal computer.

    When the user of the personal computer requests to execute a transaction and part of the transaction is about to be executed in the server system, the recorded set of characteristics is transmitted from the client system into the server system during initialization of transaction execution in the server system. This is only required if the specific instance of the personal computer is not alread...