So, the other day, I blogged about a problem with ComputeWithForm in LotusScript. Many of you feel that ComputeWithForm was the hack, rather than the workarounds, which is fine and dandy. However, if you have an application that already uses ComputeWithForm and you’re having issues, head over to Julian’s blog to get the tool he created to help find what is causing the failure.

An interesting note, I used the tool and found that I was getting an error on a field that had the following (admittedly poorly written) @Formula in input translation: @Date(@ThisValue). Of course, the formula should have been: @If(@thisvalue = “”; “”; @Date(@ThisValue)). However, the first formula still worked on the front-end document. If the field was blank, the doc still would refresh and save without error. BUT, if the field was blank, it was causing ComputeWithForm to fail. I was able to discover that, thanks to Julian’s ComputeWithForm tool.

My original problem had nothing to do with the field I wanted recalculated, but another field altogether.

Thanks Julian!

So I’ve got a problem. Apparently I am not the only one with this problem, nor is it a new problem. That being the case, I wondered if anyone had a more elegant (aka less hackish) solution.

I’ve got a scheduled agent using LotusScript, specifically using the “ComputeWithForm” method to (hopefully) recalculate computed fields. I could swear that this agent used to work, and now does not. Coincidentally, someone recently pinged me to see if something was up with 8.5.2 because he noticed the same behavior (that is used to recalculate and now does not) once he upgraded. A little bit of digging, and a lot of bothering people (thanks Julian!) discovered this blog post from Duffbert (whom I would have bothered, if he wasn’t on vacation!) showing that this is an iffy proposition and has been since at least 2004!

Two workarounds are stated, the first being ToolsRefreshAllDocs, which unfortunately, does not work for me in this case since I get an error about too many documents.

The second workaround is to have the LotusScript agent perform the calculation itself (rather than refreshing the field calculation on the document).

I think both of these sound pretty hack-tastic.

All the other solutions I can come up with are front-end/UI methods and therefore won’t work in a scheduled agent. I supposed I could write a front-end agent and just wake up every morning at 3AM to run it manually.

Anyone else out there run into this? Have a better solution?