A Coder From South Africa

Hi There.

I'm busy with an HR Application, and decided not long ago to use Private Views to sort out my View Access Problems. Basically, I needed to use @Username in my View Selection.

What I found out at the end of the day, is that Private Views, in my opinion, are not the way to go for the following reasons:

1. In most cases, private views are stored in the user's Desktop.dsk file, which means maintenance on these views becomes very messy.
2. When modifications are made to the Private View Design, these changes are not replicated to the user's Private View instances. The solution here is for the user to delete their private views. Now you can see where it gets messy.
3. After attempting to auto delete Private views in about 7 different ways, the result was that private views are never guaranteed to be deleted. There is always a scenario where one of the user's private views decided to stick around.
4. Private Views are very, very slow, because they need to be re-built on every open, so as to collect the latest information from the server.
5. The parameter "Evaluate Actions for every document change" doesn't work in Private Views.
6. Finally, for this blog entry at least, Private views do not work properly with @UserName. I have users who open Private views, and instead of seen 55 that they have access to, they land up seen less. This is different per user. The big kicker here, is that if they delete their private view, all 55 entries return, until the next day when some dissappear again.

I have spent months trying to find help and solutions regarding this. Thanks to Nathan T Freeman for suggesting @SetViewInfo as an alternative. I am currently implementing this in the application in place of the private views, and will definitely provide feedback here.

I hope this entry was not too negative for everyone. The idea is to fish out a positive solution to this, which I've spent months trying to find.

Cheers All, and I wait in anticipation for everyone's feedback.

Modified 2008/10/21 07:00pm - Added another entry to the cons list of using private views.

Hi All. I've recently had a huge demand on companies wanting to go mobile with mail, etc. I've been playing around with mNotes (commontime) and reading up on Lotus Notes Traveler.

Here's a basic rundown at present of the software mentioned above:

Commontime mSuite (includes mNotes)

- Compatible with Windows Mobile 5 and 6 ; Palm OS ; Symbian
- Synchronizes directly on the server
- Allows deployment of Notes Applications to mobile devices
- Compatible with R6.5 and up (could be R5 and up....not too sure)

Lotus Notes Traveler

- Only works with Windows Mobile 5 and 6 (based on IBM information page)
- Runs as a Domino Server Task
- Cannot deploy applications to mobile devices
- Compatible with R8.0.1 and above

It obviously gets more technical than this, and there's where you find that there are some unfortunate restrictions with Traveler.

I'm currently leaning towards commontime at present, firstly because it supports deployment of notes applications, secondly because it's compatible with previous versions of notes. The only difference worth mentioning, is that your Lotus Notes User License acts as a Traveler License, which means off-hand that no additional costs are involved with Lotus Notes Traveler, where with commontime there is a license cost.

I could be mistaken. Your Thoughts?

I've been fortunate to try out commontime mNotes for a month on my Tytn 2, and it really impressed me.

This morning, while training a few developers, I stumbled upon a piece of functionality I would've never thought existed in notes:

I was teaching the pro's and con's of using qualified vs relative vs dynamic urls, and made good mention of @WebDbName and it's benefits. In my example, I wanted to show how a url would look in order to "compose a form" when creating hotspots in Forms or Pages. Below is an example of how this could be done, from worst to best:

QUALIFIED URL = "http://www.domainname.com/ApplicationFolder/DatabaseName.nsf/FormAliasName?OpenForm"

RELATIVE URL = "/ApplicationFolder/DatabaseName.nsf/FormAliasName?OpenForm"

DYNAMIC URL = "/" + @WebDbName + "/FormAliasName?OpenForm"

When one of the developers asked me what would happen if just adding the "/FormAliasName?OpenForm", leaving out the beginning "/" and @WebDbName, I laughed and said that the url returned will be dodgy and incorrect. Been a person who believes in visually proving a point, I changed the code in my hotspot, and added the following url, "FormAliasName?OpenForm", not realizing that I accidentally left out the "/" before the "FormAliasName". Low and behold, the result was a fully qualified url where the domain, filepath and file name were dynamically generated by Notes itself, without any need of using @WebDbName.


BOTTOM LINE:


"FormAliasName?OpenForm" - WORKS and REPLACES "/" + @WebDbName + "/FormAliasName?OpenForm"

"/FormAliasName?OpenForm" - DOESN'T WORK


N.B. The Above example assumes that you are composing a Form on the current server, in the current database.

Cheers
John

 Greetings and Salutations to All on BleedYellow. I have the privilege and honor of been part of this site. My name is John Jardin, and I'm born and bred in Joburg, South Africa. i am a huge fan of Lotus Notes Development, amongst other types of coding scenarios.

I am a musician or sorts. I felt this was important to mention, as Nathan Freeman, (AKA - Mr T) so accurately commented recently that there is a mysterious link between music and programming. I play guitar mostly, and also enjoy recording.

Back to the matter at hand:

I would like this opportunity to share my experiences and knowledge on this Blog, more from a coding perspective, as I'm not really regarded as a PRO administrator as yet. I believe there is a ton I can learn from this site, and would in turn, love to give my share.

Anyways, I will be posting my next entry soon, and will try my best to make it a good one. I will always welcome comments and feedback just so everyone knows.

Thanks and hope to hear feedback from anyone out there. Anyone at all.

John