Field unavailable issue - Notes 6 to Notes 8.5

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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I have been developing in Notes for many years, and often add fields to documents without them being present on the form. Something like:

doc.newField = “New Value”

I often use this for “control” fields that indicate that a document needs to be processed by an agent, and then use a lookup view that refers to the presense of the field in the selection formula, eg:

SELECT newField = “1”

I am currently experiencing a problem with a database that has been moved from a Notes 6 server to a Notes 8.5 server, and had its ODS updated to 51. It appears that new fields created in this way are unavailable to view indexing processes. So in the scenario above, the view is always empty, suggesting that the indexer cannot “see” that this new field exists and is populated.

I have copied the selection formula into a SmartIcon (old school, sorry!) and shown that the data is there, and it can of course be seen in the field list under properties. View indexing properties are just as they are for all my dozens of other views that work this way, and have done for the past decade (I started the system in Notes 4.5).

A workaround is to add the field to the form design, and use ComputeWithForm, but really this should not be necessary (and it is a huge form). I could also try using a db.search rather than a view, but the view is being used to improve performace (the database is 12Gb, with 750,000 docs). It works perfectly in a backup version of the system in Notes 6, and I have not been able to reproduce the problem in a new Notes 8.5 database with some test scripts. The problem occurs whether the client is Notes 6 or 8.5.

I’m really baffled - I’ve never come across anything like this, and it is a serious problem in my environment, as there are large numbers of processes that rely on this simple method.

It seems to be a problem specific to the database, perhaps due to the ODS change, perhaps not. There are no other symptoms or issues with the system, which has been running on Notes 8.5 servers for a couple of months (users are still on Notes 6, shortly to be moving to 8.5).

I wondered if anyone had seen anything like this, or had any suggestions. The option “Allow more fields in database” is switched on.

My thanks in advance for any help!

PW

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Subject: That would be a horrible, horrible bug.

Are you sure the field’s Summary flag is set?

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Subject: Field summary flag

Eric, that is a good idea - I’ll check it out and report back. Of course it should be set by default (I’ve never had to check before), but it is possible that it isn’t here for some reason, and it would certainly make sense…

I really hope it’s not a horrible bug - it seems so unlikely, but I’m just stumped.

Thanks very much for the suggestion, I’ll let you know what I find a little later.

PW

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Subject: Field summary flag was the culprit

Erik, thank you for your help - the field was NOT set as summary data, and this was what was causing the problem. The behaviour was slightly different in Notes 6, but for other reasons. The bug is with the developer…

Nice to learn something new after 12 years! As the help clearly states:

“When you create a new item using New, the IsSummary property for the item is False. If you want the item to appear in views and folders, you must explicitly change its IsSummary property to True.”

Well that’s something new to me, but now I realise that I very rarely create a new object using New NotesItem (which I did not report in my initial comment, due to another mistake on my part sighs)

So many many thanks for preserving the last vestiges of my sanity, and apologies for spelling your name incorrectly too!

All the best

Paul