I spent the day putting in a new XPage. One may wonder how it’s possible to spend a day doing that, but it’s pretty easy. On even relatively simple XPage there are literally hundreds and hundreds of edits to be done to attributes alone, what with how insanely verbose XML is, and that’s not counting formatting or anything else. So it was today.
XML. It’s the new COBOL.
I work in a template, even for development. When I got done I refreshed Design, then I attempted to use it. It says the new XPage doesn’t exist. I go back to the template in DDE. The new XPage has a red X next to it, so I open it. It says it can’t open the editor because an index is out of bounds. I look at the Problems tab. It says the XPage can’t be found in the database.
WHAT??
I put in a PMR with the stack trace, but really what is Lotus going to do? Reimburse me for my time? Beta testers don’t get reimbursed for their time, silly rabbit.
I’ve heard you catch more flies with honey. I ain’t seeing no honey from Lotus, so just what are they trying to catch?..
Subject: Not a help for you , but this happened to me to
…and I believe it happened because I copied an existing xPage, and renamed and modified this. Thankfully I didn’t loose much, as most of the work was in a SSJ-library that did not disappear.
Subject: PMR is already closed as “non-reproducable”, as expected…
I know what it’s like when the user (me in this instance) gets some error that the developer (lotus in this instance) can’t reproduce. It’s a nightmare. As a developer I’ve run that gauntlet over and over. But it’s like I said in response to them closing the PMR … these things should be tracked, and that PMR is tracking data for IBM. I expect they’ll totally ignore it, but one can always hope.
I would also expect them to suggest a way to trap debug data if it should happen again, or point to logs if they are generated now. Simply brushing me off because it’s intermittent does little to engender confidence that IBM cares in the slightest about the developer experience.
Subject: I feel your pain man. Maybe you could ask IBM for…
…some sort of logging? I’d gladly stream DDE logging information to a text file as I worked, rolling over after, say, 5 GB. Then be able to upload said file when something mysterious happened.