I have a method in my API that handles the sync operations with the company’s ERP. This method is called once every 30 minutes by a script I made to ensure that everything will be always up date. However, if someone wants, they also can make a request to the endpoint by themselves, but they also need to be informed if the operation is currently processing or not

So, my solution is: I keep a flag on the database and set it to true when the transaction ongoing and false when it ends, so my application will check it and proceed/stop based on this condition

There’s just one problem: as I’m keeping everything in a single transaction, the flag is actually useless since only inside the single transaction it will be set to true. I thought about updating the flag before starting the transaction and reverting it whenever an error happens, but I can’t ensure the reversal process will happen 100% the times (so there’s a possibility to lock the operation)

My code is the following one, if anyone needs it for reference:

@api_view(['POST'])
def syncErpItems(request):
    try:
        with transaction.atomic():
            job = Jobs.objects.get(name='items')
            if job.updating:
                return Response({'message': 'Sync already ongoing'})
            job.updating = True
            job.save()

            updateItems()

            job.updating = False
            job.last_execution = timezone.now()
            job.save()
            return Response({'message': 'Success'})

    except Exception as e:
        return Response({'message': 'Error on sync: ' + str(e)})

Some things to keep in mind:

• It is not a possibility to let the lock happen and manually fix it later given other circumstances
• The sync operation takes like 30/40 seconds, there are lots of content coming from the ERP