We love Notes, but …

If you are updating to 8.5 take a close look at all of your applications. Especially when they are using Notes View Navigators and Notes View entries in a rather simple construction to do some work for you.

A simple yet elegant code construction to do some work for you when you need to navigate through views is this one:


Dim nav as NotesViewNavigator
Dim category as NotesViewEntry
Dim nve as NotesViewEntry
.
.
.
Set category = nav.GetFirst
Do Until category Is Nothing
Set nve = nav.GetNextDocument(category)
.
.
.
Set category = nav.GetNextCategory(category)
Loop


Which works fine until you update to version 8.5

If you do that it breaks. You will end up with different failures leading to not really going down the view the correct way. If you are lucky it will break your code and you will see that it is breaking. But what we found out is that there are in fact possible issues with that where you will for example have the first category read and all subsequent categories ignored which depending on your implementation will have some “effects” to your data integrity.

It is not, that the fact that this is broken is unknown to IBM.

Take a look here SPR # PRUN7NZRBR …. and here SPR # OIHZ7NAPDQ … these are two entries that are open since … well just take a look yourself.

We filed another ESR (PMR number 77885 999 724) for that issue and IBM’s support, which could not do anything for that but was really helpful in tracking this down, said this would be added to the other people who have seen and reported this and that this would let this issue climb the importance rank a little bit. We both were wondering how on earth this could escape the quality assurance program (i hope IBM has one). And i hope that they have written a testcase to block this from happening again.

What is not funny is, that after seeing this issue rising on a core component of lotus script, nothing has happened to fix it for a minimum of 3 months, just because both customers, who presented it “officially”, found a workaround.

And if you think further, about IBM “releasing some people”, you might come to the conclusion that, perhaps, they have thrown out to many of those contributors who might have known how to fix this issue immediately. But that is just my own private opinion and not hardened by any facts i know.

This entry was posted on Dienstag, April 14th, 2009 at 13:24 and is filed under Funktion, Notes 8.5, Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.