I recently became the go-to developer for ALL of our company’s hundreds of Notes Apps, most designed in V5, a healthy handful in V4. Around the same time, the company added a new Notes Domain, doubling the user base. The result has been a nightmare of ‘this used to work’ (for legacy dbs) and ‘why doesn’t this work for this (new domain) user but it works for that (old domain) user’? for another subset of apps.
This is what I’ve have learned the hard way (and I do mean hard) over the past several months.
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The problematic legacy databases where the old domain’s users were fine but the new domain’s users were not, turned out to use Authors/Readers to control access. The programmers of these legacy dbs routinely stored the Common Name in these fields. Which was fine on the old domain, but useless for the new domain. (Nightmare #1: writing a script to cycle through 50,000 documents, and look up EVERY name in the Authors/Readers field, lookup up the canonical name from the NAB and replacevalue. For just ONE db)
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Legacy dbs that programmatically altered the contents of an Authors/Readers field. Not for them a simple computed field on the form, these coders wrote Lotusscript to shuffle names in and out. Which R5 apparently took in stride, while R6 does not. (Nightmare #2: tracking down EVERY instance of an Authors/Readers field that was being manipulated by LS and recording from ‘doc.Authors1 = newvalue’ to ‘Set Aitem = doc.GetFirstItem(“Authors1”)…Aitem.isAuthors = True’)
There are other issues, but those are the top two, constituting over three months of my life so far. So my question is - is there anything else I have to look forward to? I’m ready for a preemptive strike, so if anyone has any tips to stave off R6 problems caused by lazy legacy code, I am all ears.