Since I only get a view full of conflict documents when trying to achieve this, I wonder if anyone has anything like it to share with me? I need it for demo purposes and I am getting very frustrated with these conflicts…
Subject: Save my weekend! Example db with letting the user set view(/row) colors with a profile document?
You might have been misled by Designer Help, which says you can “allow users to determine the colors for a column by means of a generic profile”. In fact you can only allow a database administrator to set the colours. The colours are stored in the view when it is built. All users see the same colours. This is why that word “generic” is in there and Designer Help goes on to note (misleadingly, again) that, "the feature is only useful for a database with only one user,"Designer help also mentions “a formula field” in the profile form. It is not a Formula field. It is a Text field that contains the uncompiled text of a formula. The formula evaluates in the context of each document in the view, resulting in a colour value for that document. The colour value is either a foreground colour: text “00rrggbb”, or a background colour and a foreground colour as a text list with two elements: “00rrggbb” : “00rrggbb”, where rr, gg and bb are hexadecimal digits.
Designer Help tells you that the value in the colour column “can be any valid formula”. Only @UserName seems to work. When I use anything else, all the documents are marked as conflicts.
It looks like this feature was invented by someone who did not understand how views work. The user name was included to allow each user to have a separate profile, and the help was drafted. When it came to coding the feature, the programmer found out that views are built in advance and shared by all users. So the feature was dumbed down and the word “generic” was put in the help to cover up.
If you would still like an example, let me know. I tested this in a huge messy test database, but I can paste together a demo fairly quickly.
Subject: Thanks a lot!
The one change that made it work was to use the @Username-function in the column!
I totally agree with you on the help document, I also reacted at the “formula field” reference.
You two guys have saved my weeken, it’s 7pm in Stockholm, Sweden, and I’m finally done!
Subject: Check LotusGeek.com
Rocky Oliver wrote in his blog recently about using this feature, and I think he mentioned the profile documents. See http://www.lotusgeek.com and look for last months entries. He should have an example db around.