In my Notes database I have several views which are sorted by country and region. Many of the users want to be able to see just their country and nothing else. One way to do this is to have a separate view for each country but that is messy and makes maintenance a pain. The alternative I suggested is to sort by the country field or use the search option on that view. The search is good as that does only show the relevant countries / regions, however the limitation is that we have some region names which are also common parts of words, e.g searching for region NE gives results for regions NE, and also other documents that are not region NE but have say one of the comments fields with the word “signed” in them. A case sensitive option on the search would be good but I don’t see that available.
Any other suggestions for prompting within the view? I guess an action button which manipulates the view in some way is an alternative but I was hoping for something quicker!
Categorize the view(s) by the country/region, and use @SetViewInfo([SetViewFilter]) to show only the relevant category. You can get the region from an @Prompt.
I’ve been so focused on working with new UI features (thank you Chris Blatnick and Nathan T. Freeman for that) that I haven’t spent the time to really get to know 6.5 (we’re what you call 'late adapters).
The next couple of days is devoted to reading every freaking @function and LS method/property.
Holy crap - how very freaking cool! It even works if you put the @SetViewInfo into the view’s post open event. This offers up an option for a user to specify which category they really want to see one time and then the view ‘remembers’ what they like! For a couple of our dbs where users tend to work on the same set of docs (assembly processes) all the time, they can ‘set it and forget it’ and filter out all the crap they don’t care to see.
Also not, that this is not even a new feature of 6.5. Like so many new functions, it’s been sitting there and waiting for us since Notes 6 (the most underrated release ever, as I usually say).
Ah, but while we were busy playing with Notes and Domino 6, Doug was chugging along in R4.6. Like many, I felt his pain, and I know that the sudden jump to ND 6.5 must be like a direct transition from telegraph to videoconferencing. I worry for the sanity of those who try to transition from R4.6 to Notes 8+.
Well understood. I know of at least one insurance company, that was still running a number of 4.5 Clients a couple of months ago.
It’s just that from my experience, the move from 4.x to 5 was completed by the majority of customers (even if some did not) some time around 5.0.6 or so, whereas the reception of Domino 6 (at least here in Europe) was extremely slow. Too many just saw it as a visually pimped version of 5. From my point of view, Notes and Domino 6 brought an incredible bunch of improvements to Notes developers, web developers and admins, alike. But they were probably not so obvious at a first glance as e.g. the shift from navigators to framesets was in 5.
Looking back, 6.5 brought more some improvements and 7 - which looked pretty disappointing at first - added quite a bit, especially in 7.0.2 and 7.0.3. In fact, I would probably not want to go back to 6. But still people keep discovering stuff, that’s been there for more that 5 years now. Not for all though, that’s true.
To quite some degree IBM must be blamed for it. Back then, many customers had massive doubts about the future of the Notes/Domino plattform. IBM promoted “products” like Workplace 1 (pre-beta software at best) and definitely took the wrong route to lead their customers to new technologies. It’s good to see how all this has changed with V8.
Interesting how slow the upgrade path is for some places. I guess it’s the old familiarity over something new.
Here we have always upgraded to each release within about a year of them being out so we are not too far behind. I’d hate to be on 4.5 still.
What are the differences for 7.0.2 and 7.0.3 over plain old 7.0? We haven’t gone that far yet so maybe we are more behind than I thought, as version 8 is out now.
Actually no, it’s not about fear of moving. There were several drivers keeping us back.
Notes is not a core platform for the corporation. It moved into the company when we brought in a manufacturing job from another company (actually I came from the old company). Rather than re-create the manufacturing systems in place at the original company, we elected to drop in their Notes system. IT provides no support so there was no corporate driven upgrade strategy.
Licenses were paid for, not rented. It’s New England. Can you say ‘cheap’? This is the land of ‘Why push an old barn down when it’ll eventually fall down by itself’. Upgrade costs were high, the apps worked, why pay for perceived benefits?
Regulatory issues. We’re a medical device company. Change anything and you’re in the middle of a risk assessment, validation planning, test protocols, documentation, approval, yada yada yada. There is a real cost to moving forward and unless you can document a reason for an upgrade, it can be hard to justify.
Loss of support was not an issue. We owned licenses, didn’t pay for support from IBM, never used support so who cares if IBM stops official support for the version?
Pretty much all of these still exist as issues so the migration to something higher than 6.5 is going to be a project.
