Good way to check against existing documents

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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Hi, this is an Absence Request database. If user submits the Absence request form, then later doesn’t take the day off, they select the document, then click on an Action button that verifies the form name, then does a Dblookup to ensure that they haven’t already cancelled that request. If all is ok, the data from the form is copied into a new form with all values * -1, which effectively cancels (adds back in) any hours they have requested.

Of course, someone has now entered a request, cancelled it, entered another request for the same day that is exactly the same, and now needs to cancel it. So – how can I match the cancels up to a specific request?

The current Dblookup view (CheckDupCancel) has only the Cancel form documents with the key being the user name and the date requested field as the only other column.

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Subject: Good way to check against existing documents

My personal approach is to simply things.The approach I’d take would be to remove the request and cancellation from the views of “active” documents, because they’ve both been logically neutralized and should no longer be allowed to affect the reporting of information. That would leave only one effective submission at any given time.

HTH,

Collin

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Subject: Good way to check against existing documents

  • You can’t, post-event. You don’t have enough information on your Cancel Form to uniquely identify any given request cancellation.- A better approach may have been to use the UniqueID of the request document as the key for the CheckDupCancel View. The important link is to the request, not to the user. If you tweak for that, you should be able to keep same-day request cancellations apart. Naturally you can still have the user and date on the Cancel form, just don’t use them as the key.

  • The suggestiong of just deleting the request, if it’s politically viable, certainly would simplify your life quite a bit, though.

  • Hope this helps…

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Subject: Thanks Collin & David

Thanks for the suggestions. I’m going to try all of your suggestions to see which one fits the requirements best!