I have an intermittent problem when people save documents. Some of the time for some people, they report that they have made and saved their changes, but when to go back later (i.e. hours or days later), their changes are NOT there; the form seems to has gone back a previous state. Even the people that get this “error”, they can not reproduce it on any type of consistent/regular basis (i.e., no pattern).
This form does make use of the SaveOptions field but it seems to always work correctly for me!!!
Any thoughts or ides are greatly appreciated.
Subject: RE: Strange Saving/Not Saving Issue
The question is, is there any evidence that the documents in question were ever successfully saved? Are you ever told that someone closed the document after saving, opened it later and saw their changes, and then still later their changes were gone?
If that never happens, then the problem is probably with the original save. I would look really hard at that SaveOptions field and what you do with it. There’s probably a sequence of events that leaves it with the value “0”, so that users can use Ctrl+S and close the document, thinking they have saved it. If you ever, ever, set the value to “0”, check every possible code path up to the point that you clear the value. Think about what happens if an error occurs in your code while the value is “0”. Do you trap the error and clear SaveOptions?
If the users are pretty sure that they have seen their changes later, after saving, and then come back later and their changes were gone, you probably have some kind of replication issue. Notes doesn’t keep a backup copy, in general, so there’s no source for the old version to come back from except another replica. Look at the $UpdatedBy and see whether the user’s name is in there. Does the $Revisions field show the document having been edited at about the time the user said they edited it? Is there someone else who edited it at around that time? Possibly there is a replication conflict and conflict resolution is set so that one version is discarded. Is it possible that the user’s changes are still in the database as a replication conflict, and the views are set up such that the replication conflict document isn’t visible in any of them?
Subject: RE: Strange Saving/Not Saving Issue
Thanks for the information. I do think it’s mostly the first scenario you mentioned … the people make a change, save their change (without exiting), and later exit the form. They typically do not go back in to look that their changes were actually saved (although, that is exactly what I would do if I was having “saving issues”).
I will re-re-look into the SaveOptions settings.
The thing that still gets me is … even the actual user that reports the problem, they can never reproduce the error.
Subject: RE: Strange Saving/Not Saving Issue
Ask them about the error message they got when editing the document. The one that came up when they were doing something else, before they tried to save it.