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3 Gotchas Regarding Upgrading to Domino R8.5.2

2011-07-29T04:34:00.000-07:00

We've just successfully upgraded 35 Domino servers (mail, application, BES, Sametime and LEI). It all went swimmingly, no outages, no incidents.

I just wanted to share a few things that we stumbled across along the way that will help another upgrade go even smoother.

Policy Documents

As part of the upgrade it is recommended opening, editing and saving all of your policy documents after an R8 upgrade. We did this. However, we have a bespoke application that a subset of trusted users can use to register mail users. The bespoke app used LotusScript to perform the registration. It stopped working after the upgrade.

We logged the following error:

Error: Notes error: Document is not signed. (Reader) in RegisterUser

After checking the obvious we ended up cutting all of the policy and policy settings documents out of the names.nsf and pasting them back in. Then going back into the policy documents and adding the policy settings back to each policy (the UNID's of the settings are stored in the policy document not the name and these change when we paste them back in).

It worked OK after that.

Duplicate Subforms.

We had reports of people no longer being able to open some applications on the web. In particular when they were opening views.

In the log.nsf of our application server this message was appearing:

HTTP Web Server: Application Exception - Duplicate Subform found

It is common amongst developers pre R8 to take advantage of duplicate subforms for things like page headers and footers on web pages. Indeed, this is the technique used on many of our web enabled applications. I immediately thought we would have to do code changes in lots and lots of applications.

Thankfully, a fix was released in 8.5.2 that involves making a change to the servers notes.ini (DominoAllowDuplicateSubforms=1). Documented here:

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/R5FixList.nsf/SPRNum/3593D74FE51C0D898525778500581F68?OpenDocument&ca=drs-fo

NotesSession Platform property returns "AIX/64" instead of "UNIX"

We had LotusScript agents that relied on knowing what OS they were on in order to work e.g. to extract files. It used session.platform to do this. Expecting it to return "UNIX" or "Windows". See below

    Select Case session.platform
    Case "Macintosh" : getFileSeparator = ":"
    Case "UNIX" : getFileSeparator = "/"
    Case Else : getFileSeparator = "\"
    End Select

The upgrade means it now returns "AIX/64". That's not in the case statement above! This has only just been documented as a problem by IBM and was not part of the code searches that we did prior to the upgrade. This potentially affects any code that relies on "UNIX" being returned as a value when using session.platform.

Details here:

https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21499642

Essentially we need to add the following to our servers notes.ini

PLATFORM_RETURNS_UNIX=1

Closing Note

We used TeamStudio Analyzer to help us audit the design of our applications prior to our upgrade but two of the gotchas above were not part of our analysis. I'll be feeding this back to them and see if they can add it to their list of Analyzer filters.

Hopefully this post was useful to someone.

iNotes and PC/Laptop Network Card Settings

2011-04-07T04:27:00.000-07:00

We are upgrading from R7 servers to R8.5.2 servers.

After upgrading the servers in our development environment we were keen to try out iNotes. It loaded fine but when we came to send an email the message came up:

The server did not respond quickly enough. The server may be down or having problems. If this error occurs when you are sending mail, you may need to reduce the size of the attachments and try again.

It worked on my desktop PC but not a laptop. Both machines had IE8. To cut a long story short, it was a problem with the settings of the network card of the laptop that we were testing on. The network speed was set to auto, changing it to 100mb full duplex resolved the problem and we are now happily sending emails in iNotes 8.

Point of note for myself is that being a good Lotus Notes Admin\Developer requires a broader knowledge of I.T. than just the product we specialise in.

As always, always learning.

Always learning - $$HTMLFrontMatter and MIME Reply-To

2010-11-26T02:27:00.000-08:00

This week I've learnt to new two new tricks in Lotus Notes that have made my job as a developer easier and thus made me smile.

Firstly, the field $$HTMLFrontMatter.

I was doing some development with Javascript Libraries (JQuery and Prototype) and found that when I came to put everything in a form rather than a page things stopped working.

I compared the difference in the HTML source between the the page and the form (I had after all just done copy and paste). The only difference was the HTML header.

Domino sticks the following in the top of the form:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

I just wanted (by the way the enviroment I am in is R7)

<!DOCTYPE html >

It didn't do it in the page because the page was marked as HTML.

It was this header that was stopping my lovely new JQuery and Prototype functionality from working. I was resided to failure until I found the wonderful $$HTMLFrontMatter field. It's never been a problem because I've never had the problem despite doing plenty of web development that included JQuery. It's documented in lots of places like Codestore , Notes.Net and Domino 2.0. It now means I can just output as the header as I want and everything works.

The other thing I learnt was that to set the Reply To address in a MIME email I need to set "Reply-To" not "ReplyTo" as I thought it would be e.g.

Set mimeheader = body.CreateHeader("Reply-To")

Looking Forward to ILUG

2010-11-09T08:07:00.000-08:00

Just a post to say how much I am looking forward to being at ILUG tomorrow.

If you bump into me and I look a bit jaded then it's because I am still recovering from the excellent Night of the Dead film festival.

See you all in Belfast

Fixing a problem that doesn't exist

2010-10-05T06:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got involved in helping out a customer who was having trouble booking a room. The customer was saying that they were not authorised to book the room.

The room was set so that Owner Options were "Specific People" and in the list of names was a group.

The customer was telling us that they were not authorised to book the room even though they were named in the correct group.

The administration team checked the group, they were named correctly.

They checked the type of group; it was "Multi-Purpose".

They checked the ACL of the resource database and the group was listed, it was typed correctly, it was listed as a type of group and it had had Author access.

There was no reason why it should be not be working.

I was asked by the administration team if I had any ideas that might help. We went through the checklist above.

So, being a developer, I started delving into the design and searching for suggestions on notes.net.

I found fields in the form that use @ExpandNamesList and wonder if it's that, I also find some people on notes.net suggesting that using groups in this way is flaky.

I started to get run aground with ideas, I asked my team member what the exact wording of the error was, they did not know.

At this point I decided to test the existing setup myself by adding then removing myself from the group and trying to book the room. It seemed to work for me; I got a rejection when I'm not in the group and an acceptance when I am in the group. I wasn't celebrating though as I am named in lots of administration groups so it's not a true test.

I called the customer and asked if I could take remote control of their machine. The first thing I noticed was that they are directly in the resource database, not their own calendar. We have locked down the resource databases so that reservations must be made through your calendar. I asked them to book the room as they normally would. I watch the customer try to book the room directly in the resource database and see that they are met with a not authorised message.

I asked the customer to book the same room through their calendar, it worked. Therefore, there was no problem, just a misunderstanding of what the problem was.

The customer had a legitimate reason for booking directly in the resource database. The customer gets lots of requests by both internal and external people to book rooms on their behalf and they did not want all the bookings in their own calendar.

So, after all that time we just needed to understand the problem before we started to fix it. We put this one particular customer in the list of owners individually (so they could book direct) and kept the group for other people.

Hopefully, this helps someone out there.

I Should Know Better: Another View Column Gotcha

2010-06-14T04:12:00.000-07:00

How many times do I make this mistake with @Dblookup or @DBColumn.

I must remember that they do not return anything if I hard code a value that is a constant in a view column.

Today I put the value of "1" in a column so I could do a @DBLookup and count the occurrences using @elements. I wanted to use "1" because it would mean that it would take a long time before the 64k limit would be hit.

"@DbLookup can return no more than 64KB of data"

I spent about 10 minutes debugging it when it did not return anything but did return something for other columns. Then I remembered the above and swapped it for the first character of a field using @Left.

Groan. What a noob!

Does anyone else find themselves making these newbie mistakes?

What is SharePoint?

2010-06-09T04:00:00.000-07:00

Jake at CodeStore asked the question: What Exactly is SharePoint?

Before you read this keep in mind I am a Lotus Notes developer and I like the product :-)

I've worked on two migration projects that have attempted to migrate Lotus Notes applications/databases to SharePoint 2007 and I can tell you SharePoint is not Lotus Notes.

It has some similarities to Lotus Notes in that SharePoint Lists are what we can views, items are what we call documents, permissions are what we call security, but that's kind of where it stops. I could write a very long list of functionality that it cannot do out of the box that Lotus Notes can.

If anything, SharePoint is more comparable to Quickr. It's good for document sharing but off the shelf it's not really a development platform by itself. If I want to start doing more challenging business requests in SharePoint then I might need to start using .ASP.net, visual studio, Excel Services, InfoPath and Forms Services, Enterprise Search, third party web parts. All of these work with SharePoint but none of which are in built into SharePoint.

Indeed, when you are migrating a Lotus Notes database to SharePoint you may get to the point where you might as well of just written it in ASP.net rather than trying to squeeze a square peg into a unsupported round hole.

I'll leave you with this link: http://furuknap.blogspot.com/2009/10/sharepoint-sucks-and-heres-why-part-1.html

Tip: File Upload Command

2010-06-02T06:09:00.001-07:00

The problem:

This has occurred at several places I have worked.

You have a web form with a file upload control on it so users can add attachments.

If the user types a filename directly into the input box, it must be the full pathname and it must be typed exactly otherwise an error will occur when the form is submitted.

The file input button has confused some users who have never uploaded a file before, since the filename box appears first and looks like an area where the user should type something. Some users even try and copy and paste documents into the file path.

The solution:

You can prevent users from manually changing the file path on a file upload control by adding some JavaScript to the file upload control. This will force them to use the Browse button.

View Column Gotcha

2010-05-27T07:37:00.000-07:00

Have you ever had a column in a view where no matter what formula or text you put as its value it does not seem to change. In fact, you may notice its value is identical to another column in the view.

I've fallen for this so many times. It's because of the view columns programatic name.

It happens when I copy and paste a column and it ends up with the same name. Wipe out the programatic name of the new column and press enter and you get assigned a new column programatic name. Then you can then tell your work collegues to stop calling you a noob.

Remember: @DBLookup uses the first sorted column

2010-05-24T07:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a tip from a reminder that I wrote myself back in Jan 2009.

I was trying to use $Groups in the NAB, but it excludes multi-purpose groups. I thought that was the end of the line for me as there was no other view groups with the first column as the group name. I called our admins who quite rightly informed me that @DBLookup uses the first sorted column so I could use the normal groups view. It’s first column shows an icon but is not sorted, the second column is sorted and is the group name. What a idiot I am!

Making Breadcrumbs

2010-05-20T06:32:00.000-07:00

If you are creating web pages, say for an intranet, blog etc and use parent and response documents for the structure then here's how you can make breadcrumbs using Lotus Notes formula. There's breadcrumbs will be infinite (well 32k infinite).

I once used to use stored UNIDS but then along came @While, @For and @Trnsform and made formula even more powerful.

Pop a computed field where you want the the breadcrumbs to appear and then add the following formula (you may need to change some variables etc to suit your taste).

REM {Get all the documents ancestors and pull the fields we want off them to make some breadcrumb navigation};

parentUNID:=@Text($REF);

titleList := "";
UNIDList:=@Text($REF);

@While( (parentUNID != "") ;
titleList:=@GetDocField(parentUNID;"Title"): titleList;
UNIDList:=@Text(@GetDocField( parentUNID ; "$Ref" )):UNIDList;
parentUNID := @Text(@GetDocField( parentUNID ; "$Ref" ))
);

breadcrumb:=""+@Trim(titleList:Title)+"";

@Implode(breadcrumb ; " > " ) +"
";

breadcrumbHTML:= ""+Title+"";

REM {Because the home page is document (the first document with a title of "Home") the we should prevent the breadcrumb a link to it twice if we have navigated to it using ?OpenDocument and not ?OpenDatabase. We don't want to se Home > Home as breadcrumb};

@If(@LowerCase(Title)="home";
"Home";
"Home > "+breadcrumbHTML)