Behold the power of community.

Yesterday, I blogged about a crazy Domino Designer problem I was having. Many of you commented with suggestions or ideas. One of those suggestions including shutting off the Eclipse LotusScript editor. Guess what? That worked! That isn’t the fix, however, or the end of the story.

Last night on Twitter, I happened to see a tweet from Mary Beth Raven from someone having a problem with LotusScript. The problem was suspiciously like mine. Mary Beth had suggested the user ask Maureen Leland. I pinged Maureen and told her that my problem sounded eerily the same. She took a look and discovered the item “$AssistAction_error” had been added to my wonky agent. Using Noteman, I was easily able to remove the item and all was well with my agent!

This still begs the question of HOW or WHY the item was appended, when there was no error. HOWEVER, I at least have a fix and understand why the code wasn’t displaying correctly.

I am using Domino Designer, Release 8.5.1 Revision 20090929.1223 (Release 8.5.1) installed in Windows 7 on my laptop. Over the weekend, I updated a LotusScript agent in an application template, located on the server.

On Tuesday, I went into the office and using the same version of Designer, on my Windows XP desktop. Accessing the same application template on the same server, I open the same agent…and the code is old. Basically, while working over the weekend, I had made several changes and saved frequently. The code being shown on my LAPTOP is correct and the latest version. The code shown on my DESKTOP is from an earlier save, and has errors.

To add oddity to this problem, when the code is run, it is the correct and final code. No matter which machine it is run on. When the code is viewed in the debugger it is the correct and final code. When the code is exported to DXL it is the correct and final code. ONLY when viewed in Designer (which is, you know, kind of fricking important) is the code the old code.

Here is what I have tried to figure out the problem:

Different versions of application? Nope, checked several times to be sure the server is the same, the application is the same, everything is the same.
Different users? Nope, tried accessing with different users on different machines, and the same user on different machines. The code is only correct on my laptop.
Local replica? Nope, checked sever times to be sure it’s the server version. In fact, no local replica existed until I tried that as a means for fixing this.
Make a local replica, check it, and replicate to the server? Tried it, didn’t work. Looks good on the laptop, wrong on other workstations.
Export the agent to DXL, compare and import? Exported, they were identical. Imported ANYWAY, still shows incorrectly on workstation.
Different version of Designer? Nope. I am in the 8.5.2 beta, and it didn’t work there either.
The different OS? Nope, installed on another Windows 7 machine, still no love.
Reinstall? Nope. Uninstalled, completely cleaned the machine, reinstalled. No good.

Now, something that may or may not be related. On the workstation, I frequently get the following error:

I did a quick search on google and found that some people had that error and found their LotusScript agents weren’t always compiling. That sounded PERFECT! Except, their resolution didn’t work for me. Their suggestion involved getting rid of antivirus software. Which I tried, and still no love. In fact, I uninstalled the antivirus software, uninstalled Notes, reinstalled Notes and tried again.

Anyway, seeing that the error involved Java, I made some comparisons there. Hmmm, laptop on Java 6, update 16. So put other machines on same version. Still not working.

So, anyone? Any thoughts? Suggestions? At this point, I am ready to sacrifice chickens or something, if it will work.

Modified to add all the things I tried and already forgot that I tried:

Removed the app from desktop and bookmarks
Deleted cache.ndk
Deleted the workspace
Fixup Updall Compact on the app
New Copy of the template
Copied just the agent into a new blank application

Nada zip nothing. Still broken. Fun, right?

Two semi-related gotchas in Domino development. I *was* planning on calling this post “Gotcha for Newbie Devs” until last night, when I got gotcha’d.

Originally I wanted to write about GetAllEntriesByKey (and similarly, GetAllDocumentsByKey and GetDocumentByKey). A commonly used piece of LotusScript. It often looks something like this…

set myEntries = myView.GetAllEntriesByKey(myKey)

That works just fine, giving you a NotesViewEntryCollection with entries selected by a key. The gotcha here is that this does not include the optional parameter for exactMatch and the default is FALSE. So, if your key is ABC, you will get all entries that equate to ABC and those that equal ABCD and ABCDE, etc. While this MAY be desirable, it may NOT be desirable and you need to know what you want and understand what you are going to get. I see this mistake made frequently. If you need ONLY those entries that match ABC, you need to add the exactMatch parameter and set it to True.

set myEntries = myView.GetAllEntriesByKey(myKey, True)

So, what “gotcha” happened to me last night? The application had an embedded view. 95% of the time the embedded view worked exactly as designed. The code took advantage of “Show Single Category” and used a simple formula consisting of a field name. Whatever the value of the field, that was the value used to show only the applicable documents in the embedded view. Pretty simple, right? Except when it didn’t work. For a few documents, the embedded view was showing the wrong docs. Whatever could be the problem? Well, it was similar to the problem above. When ABC category was empty, the embedded view was showing the ABCD category. Now my problem was that there isn’t a way to set “True” for an exact match anywhere on the embedded view properties or in the Show Single Category formula.

Enter Twitter and the fabulous Lotus community. I tweeted my dilemma. @DavidMTaylor had the answer. On both the Show Single Category AND embedded view’s categorized column formula, I needed to append + “~” after my field name, so ABC became ABC~. Beautifully, fantastically (if not somewhat mysteriously, at least to me), this worked!

Ah, and this morning @jhoetzl sends me this link, which would have also answered my question. Twitter-2, Google-0 in this round.