Notes error: Field is too large (32k) or ....

"Notes error: Field is too large (32k) or View's column & selection formulas are too large". I ran accross this error last week and it took a while to solve, as the error is not as descriptive as it seems.
The error occurred in a lotusscript agent while updating a document after receiving and processing an xml response from a webservice. As the agent is not dealing with changing views or view selection formulas, the problem had to be at field level.
Initially the error indicated its location in the code to be when storing the xml as an attachment on the document. But attachments are stored in rich text fields so that would be impossible.
While debugging the first thing I found is that the error would not occur at the moment an item/field would grow beyond the 32k limit, but at the moment the NotesDocument.Save method is called.
I did find a field that grew past the 32k limit, and solved it by changing the field type to richtext. But still the agent kept nagging with the 32k message.
Debugging on, it took a couple of hours of trial and error and googling around to find what was causing this next 32k limit error.
After a while I discovered that the content of the xml could occasionally contain large numbers repeating data and the agent processes this into 4 fields per repeat. The xml I discovered this on contained a 700+ repeat resulting in 2800+ extra fields on the form. As field summary was not disabled on the fields, this seemed to be causing a 32k message and excluding this code in a next debug run with the same xml confirmed this as no error was produced.
Eventually I solved the problem by replacing these 4 fields per repeat, into combining them in one richtext field using a richtext table.

Conclusion: The error message is a bit misleading, as adding more than 32k characters to a normal text field will cause a 32k error (but we already knew that), but adding lots of fields to a form with field summary enabled (which is default) can also cause this message when the total field summary exceeds the 32k limit.

This is what IBM writes about the error.

Lotus Notes client SSO problem

After rebuilding my laptop end of last year for some reason the single signon, although installed, did not work as expected and every time I started Notes I had to key in my password. Not a big deal, but definitely annoying.
Searching the web for clues also did not bring any anwsers.
The other week the old laptop was replaced by a new one. Data was copied over from old to new machine, except for the notes.ini file which I deliberately left out hoping it would solve the problem. Well it did not!

At the same time I had for some reason clicked the option to use the workspace bookmark as homepage once too often and the client also started up with the home tab and a workspace tab. Again not a big deal, but annoying. And I could not figure out where that was configured.
After going through all the options in the preferences and all lines in the notes.ini and no luck, I also checked all the folders in the "open list" button (or open list "dock" sidebar). In the "more bookmarks - startup" folder I found the workspace was listed twice. Removing those would at least solve that problem!

And indeed next time starting the Notes client, the extra workspace tab was no longer there. But more important, for some reason the SSO started working again as well. Yeeh!!

I wonder if anyone else has encountered this nice little problem as well?

Getting unique results from Xpages DbLookup and DbColumn functions

After using the DbColumn and DbLookup code I posted a while back I found another thing that needed solving.
Frequently I want these functions to only return unique values. But placing @Unique around the function calls gives the empty result as before for a repeat control if the result of the function is a single value, a string in effect.
So I added a line of code and a parameter to the functions to be able to request unique values (see the code below).

DbLookup
The code has been moved and can be found here: http://notesnl.blogspot.com/2011/09/final-version-of-dblookuparray.html


DbColumn
The code has been moved and can be found here: http://notesnl.blogspot.com/2011/09/final-version-of-dblookuparray.html

SNTT: create initial ACL on database create from template

This one is in Lotus Notes for ages, so maybe you already know it.
I had not been using it for a while, but recently re-discovered this little gem. And although not high-tech, thought I would share it.

When creating a Lotus Notes database (or application as it now called) from a template, the database can get a default ACL (e.g. you companies minimum required ACL entries) which is defined in the templates ACL.
Normal ACL entries in the templates ACL are not copied over to the new database when creating a database from a template. But ACL entries marked up in square brackets are copied accross from the templates ACL to the new database ACL (e.g. [my_acl_entry] in a template ACL will get copie to the database.

This screenshot shows an ACL of a template with normal access entries and special entries that are copied to a database when it is created from the template.