Traps in Lotus Notes fields
Fields, seemingly simple things, places to put data elements. But, like much else in your notes, they are traps for the unwary. They are traps for the more experienced developers too, just when you are looking elsewhere.
Computed for Display
The first trap is Computed for Display fields. These are intended to enable you to calculate field values on the fly, using them to display on the screen or to drive underlying functionality, without saving that result to the document on disk. They’ve often been used, along with some hide-whens, in a mechanism to prevent certain users from editing fields.
| “It will all be your fault – even if you’d had nothing to do with it.” |
The first trap is this: should the document actually contain a field of the same name as a Computed for Display field on the form, the Computed for Display field will display that document field value, rather than the expected calculated value. That one can lead to many hours of frustrated work and not a little swearing when it strikes you. It is most likely to happen when the design of an application has changed, where a field that used to be computed or editable becomes a computed for display, but the underlying data hasn’t been changed.
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