Forgive me but I have to post this rant. I’m not asking for help because there is no answer to this problem (at least no answer that anyone outside of Lotus can provide)…
Hide-when formulae, from the very begining of Notes, have been flawed. They’re buggy, they disappear without trace, they have never worked properly in any point release that I have used since I started back with 4.51.
Despite providing thousands of new features Lotus still can’t make the feature that sits at the core of just about every application ever written work as it is supposed too.
I reckon I’ve wasted days, if not weeks of development time over the last 8 years chasing the hide-when bug around, restarting Notes to see whether my formulas are still there or if the “hide-when fairy” has secretly taken them away while I wasn’t looking.
Today’s been particularly bad - about 2 hours spent fixing three lines of Rich-Text that just keeps re-appearing because of a hide-when formula that disappears after every few saves of the document.
Subject: Hundreds of releases and hide-when formulae are still utterly flawed
The main place I have experienced hide-when bugs is in tables – especially nested tables.
WARNING: Trying to program hide-whens in an editable RTF is, by definition, a loosing proposition. Users can change hide-whens on paragraphs as they edit a document. Especially if they paste anything into the RTF, the h-w formulas will change. Probably the best way to handle this is to put the RTF inside a computed subform or section.
Subject: RE: Hundreds of releases and hide-when formulae are still utterly flawed
As Bill says, I’ve seen “creeping” in release 5 and prior… not had enough experience “in anger” with 6.x to say more. However, the key phrase in Phil’s original post is his mention of problems with a rich text field – they have their own rules, which can be easily over-ridden at run-time.
Subject: In 5.x with really complicated hidewhens in tables where not every cell had a hidewhen…
you would see some “creeping” of the forumulas. They could shift up and down and left and right. Very difficult to get right. This has not happened to me in R6 at all.
Subject: RE: I have not seen those problems in R6.5 or 6.3. Have some pretty complicated nested tables.
I’ve not seen that either. The only hide-when problems I’ve had in R6 involve changing hide-whens on nested tables. If I select a batch of text including a table which already had hide-whens and change the hide-when conditions, the table retains its original conditions.
Way back in version 4.5.1 (I go back to version 2) is when these problems first became apparent to me too. One of the things I found affects whether or not the formula “stays where I want it” is the size of the formula.
I’m not talking about truncation, I’m talking about being deactivated by the designer client or server, or worse, disappearing altogether.
Further, I have many times tried to make Lotus understand that some hide when formulas can become very complex. One way to help the developer would be to change the nature of the formula to “show/hide when”. A radio button with the default of hide (for backwards compatibility) would help those of us who currently have to think backwards to write these complex hide-when formulas. The only suggestion I got from them was just put ! (or not) in front of the formula for the true case. That’s not the solution. If the document goes through many states in a workflow, this can become a bottomless pit of twisted logic. Lotus, 1)please fix the problem Phil is talking about, and 2)reconsider our suggestion for the show/hide when radio button. It would be simple to make our lives just a little less convoluted! Really.
I keep hoping that with each new version, we will get less of these ‘double negative’ situations like hide/whens. Instead we get stuff like:
R5:
Embedded views: Turn a checkbox on to disable scrollbars (why not have the checkbox just be display scrollbars?)
Database Properties: Lots here – like ‘Don’t maintain unread marks’, etc. Yes, most people do use unread marks, so reword the checkbox and make it default ON.
ND6: Can’t recall any off the top of my head - perhaps somebody can elaborate on these.
I love the designing Domino applications, but its UI has more than its share of quirkiness (e.g. Will horizontal scrollbars every appear automatically?), and I don’t expect it to improve anytime soon.
Subject: Hundreds of releases and hide-when formulae are still utterly flawed
I must agree that in R5, hide-whens were definitely flawed when used in Tables. When R6 was in development, I could feel the pain of every customer out there who complained about the problem because I was trying to develop the templates for the 6.0 release and constantly had to rewrite, resave, and sometimes completely redo tables to get them right.
A bug was opened, and it stayed open until we could find a set of steps that would consistently reproduce the problem so that it could be debugged and fixed.
Significant fixes were put into the 6.0 release and I have to say that I use hide whens and tables all the time and have not yet encountered another occurrence of disappearing hide whens or hide-whens “traveling” to the wrong table cell, etc. since that release.
If you can provide set of steps that can reproduce the problem of the disappearing hide-whens in tables, I will reopen the bug and have it escalated for R7.
The place where I noticed it most often in version 6 was when I copied and pasted. These problems were realated to copying and pasting in tables too.
I’m not sure if things changed in version 6.5 because I’m already pounding Version 7 Beta 1.
Any chance of getting a “Show / Hide when formula is true” radio button in R7, instead of just the “Hide when formula is true”.
If you’ve done serious workflow programming and other complex programming with hide when formulas, I’m sure that you will be able to relate to the benefit of the idea!
P.S. Setting the default to Hide would make it all backwards compatible.