Major problems with a notes application - Can anyone help
Iain
doubt
A. Lotus Notes and more importantly
B. Myself
This is a bit long but please bear with me.
We have a large application (server is currently NT 4 with Domino 6
server and a mix of 5 and 6 clients). The application consists of
5 Lotus notes databases that are all inter dependant. The first 4
databases were developed using Lotus Notes 4.x and this is part of a
major Customer order system. It was developed about 8 years ago and all
functionality was provided by Notes formual language.
3 years ago I assumed responsibility for the administration, bug
maintenance and further development of the application (no previous
notes development experience). We moved the application (within 3
months) from 4.6 to Lotus notes 5 with no problems at all and over the
period have spent endless number of hours enhancing the application -
all enhancement has been done using Lotusscript with any existing
routines being rewritten. Until about 4 months ago there appeared to be
no problems. At that time we upgraded the server from 5 to 6 because
the server it sat on needed upgrading from Windows NT to Server 2003.
There is a mix of 5 and 6 clients (mostly 5) as we were doing them
gradually - After searching the web for info regarding upgrade we felt
that this would be an adequate strategy. Over the intervening period
there have been some niggling problems but I have always put them down
to user problems or PEBCAKs as we call them
Problem
Exists
Between
Chair
And
Keyboard
All problems could be explained away by "You have not replicated" or
"Why do you have 2 documnets for the same thing" etc.
However, last Monday I havda user complain that a particulat action was
not working - involves updating tables on our AS400 (i-series for the
pedantic) via an ADO link. This is an action that has been working
successfully for 9 months without any problem. I sat down with the user
and rightly so the values being written to the AS400 table/record were
in some instances incorrect (in the same updated record values were
being switched between fields. Back up to my machine, Debugged the
Lotusscript for the same update and everything worked as expected - no
problems, update perfect. Down to the users machine again, debugged the
script with the same error. Looked at the script and it was identical
so I could not explain the problem.
On Wednesday a seperate user ran a different action in the morning and
achieved one result. The same action - over the same data - in the
afternoon achieved a different result. The underlying static data was
identical. THe same action gives different results - erattically on
different machines.
Today I had a user inform me that an action would now not work. I have
sat for the last 5 hours trying to work out the problem and I have come
to a dead end. This person's machine has recently been upgraded to R6
but the action worked for a while. These are the steps taken and the
problems encountered.
1. I stepped through the action on her machine. She was right, it was
not working.
The odd thing was that when I stepped through the code the program
line indicator
always appeard to be 2 lines ahead ie it was always executing the
line 2 above the
line I was expecting it to execute. Database is corrupt I thought
(wait till you see
it perform a function call to a totally unrelated function when
there has been no call)
2. I deleted the local copy of the database and created a new replica.
No joy. The
problem remained.
3. Inserted a couple of print statements in the code - using the
developer - and replicated
the changes back to the server. Ran the code on the server - from
my desktop - and
the new lines of code executed. Replicated the user database and
debugged the action.
The new lines of code do not appear to be being replicated to her
local database as I
cannot see the changes that I have made.
4. Opened the server copy of the database on her desktop and ran the
action. The new
lines of code printed the details I expected - as I had expected.
Debugged the server
copy on her local machine but I can only see the old code when I
debug the action.
Again, when I run the action I get the print debug statements
acting as I had anticipated.
5. I deleted the local copy of the database and restarted Notes.
Exactly the same.
6. I rebooted the machine but to no avail. Whenever I debug the action
- using the
server copy - I can see the old code but when I run it I get the
new debug messages
printed out. ???????
This action - with the new print messages - works perfectly on 2 other
machines, my development machine and 1 other XP machine. The database
does not have a template to inherit design from - I inherited it this
way and I have a seperate development copy on which all development
takes plae and then code is copied into the live database. No problems
with this approach before now.
Is there any explanation for the above ? If not the I am in deep
trouble.
The operating systems are a mixture of Windows XP and windows 2000.
Any comment and assistance greatfully received.
Iain
Joe Anybody
in different directories? Many Notes actions work via replica ID
rather than file path. If you have multiple replicas on a server, you
are never sure which replica will respond first resulting, in very
weird results.....Just a thought.
- Bob
On 12 Dec 2005 12:07:59 -0800, "Iain" <Email.Ia...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Iain
There is only one copy of the database on the server.
We have also checked individual PC's and there is only a single copy of
each of the databases on each machine.
A thought occured to me last night - about 3.00 am I woke up with this
thought -
I am using R5 developer while the server and some of the clients are R6
although
I am not doing anything complex
Iain
uwe.m...@gis-consulting.de
is the code located in a scriptlibrary ?
Did you try a "recompile all" ? Since R6 you can do this in Designer
with Tools -> Recompile All