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.