Lock management

Lock management gives administrators a view of the locks held on records and the means to resolve them. Locks prevent two people editing the same record at once, and keep controlled records from being changed — but occasionally a lock outlives its purpose and needs clearing.

The detail that makes lock management fit a regulated system is the accountable override. Clearing someone else’s lock is sometimes necessary — a record stuck under an editor who’s now unavailable can’t stay frozen forever — but doing it silently would be exactly the kind of unrecorded administrative intervention that undermines trust in the system. Requiring a reason, and recording it, means even this routine housekeeping leaves a trail: who released the lock, when, and why. Nothing an administrator does to a record escapes the record.

User locks and admin locks

A user lock is the routine kind: someone editing a record holds it so others don’t overwrite their work. An admin lock is a deliberate, administrative hold placed on a record. The lock view shows what’s currently locked and who holds it, so a lock that’s blocking work — for instance, one left by someone now unavailable — can be identified rather than guessed at.

Accountable override

An administrator can override a lock, but not silently: doing so requires a reason for override. That reason is recorded, so clearing someone else’s lock is an accountable action with a trail, not a quiet exception. This matters in a regulated system — even a routine intervention like releasing a stuck lock leaves evidence of who did it and why.

Part of access control

Lock management sits alongside the rest of access control: where roles and permissions govern who may act on a record, locks govern who is acting on it right now, and this area is how those locks are overseen. The enforcement model that ties access together is covered in Access rules.