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At a customer the users have a special love for a feature in HCL Notes..and it is not what you think it is :-)

It is actually "Live Text"

They sell containers and a container has number.
Actually is a prefix + serial number + a check digit.
That last digit is used to calculate if the container number is valid


The customer gets a lot emails with container numbers in them.

Many years a go I set up a "Live Text" widget in HCL Notes to recognize container numbers (and variants of it).
The widget finds container numbers every where ... in emails, different kinds of Notes document and it creates links.

Like this:

The links points to one or more Notes databases.





So the user can click on the link and Notes does a lookup in a database having information regarding a containing or a sale of container.

They love it and are completely addicted to it.

"Live Text " is VERY powerful!

It is easy to implement too.

Basically its is: a few clicks to create the Widget .. define the pattern to recognize (regex), make the lookup views in your database, set the widget and your are done.

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I have struggled for hours and hours with HCL Notes on several Macbooks.

It has been from V9 to now V12 .. it would install ...but crash as soon as password was entered.

After long conversations with HCL Support the reason for the crash seem to have been found.

A bug in the Mac version of Notes.... one letter makes Notes crash...ONE letter!.

If you run lots of agents and having used libraries in the client there will be memory leaks.....we all know that.

So the customer uses a policy to set a higher max heap space size in notes.ini.

JavaMaxHeapSize=512MB

And that helps a lot.....however...

there is a bug on the Mac version of Notes:

Setting this parameter crashes Notes immediately after entering a password.

Instead the Mac version needs to have the parameter as:

JavaMaxHeapSize=512M

So many hours wasted ...for just one letter

Hopefully this bug will be fixed i V12.0.1

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I have had users with different (weird) issues since V11 and all that would fix it was a deletion of the cache file Cache.ndk.

Cache.ndk is great for performance and you do want to keep it around, however sometimes you just need to delete it to fix issues and let it rebuild again at a Notes restart

Normally that is not easy for a user to do, since you have to shutdown Notes Client, open Explorer, find it and delete it.

However there is an easier way out... a Notes.ini setting NotesClientDeleteCache=1

Put this in the users notes.ini file (policy) and next time Notes starts it will delete cache.ndk before it starts and
set NotesClientDeleteCache=0 in so it does not delete Cache.ndk again next time Notes is started

So you can have a button for users to click with the simple code of

Dim session As New NotesSession
Call session.SetEnvironmentVar( "NotesClientDeleteCache", "1",True )

There are thousands of forgotten, hidden and undocumented notes.ini settings.

You will have to cross the entire internet to find this one....but it is all worth it :-)

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The Workspace in Notes has always been the center of (Lotus/IBM/HCL) Notes.

Always been the good and the evil.

Many attempts have been tried to fix it, remove it completely or ignore it.

Still ...not much have changed

What is really needed to make the Workspace work is not another cosmetic overhaul, but to fix what is not working.

Much organizations that use Notes have MANY database which quickly makes the Workspace a complete mess.

You can not find database easily

What is needed is the ability to sort by server (server, by categories on DB properties, most used, ...),.. maybe to group databases together within a tab

Really just to be able organize the database in a smart way.

And of course you need to program the Workspace, the Tabs, where databases goes etc.


But in V12 to make things round and different colors does not change anything

Remember the saying ..."If you put lipstick on a pig...it is still a pig" ... ;-)


Some examples of the many Workspace attempts

(The first one I like best)

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Normally my Domino upgrades runs smoothly on Linux (Centos) but the last upgrade to FP1 was strange.

I shutdown the Domino server, did the upgrade and everything seem to go well

However after starting the Domino server again, it would show up as still running version V11.0.1.
The same happened to another Domino on Linux server I upgraded.

I reported the issue to HCL,and got an answer back. Apparently some strings resource files was not updated during the upgrade.

The fix was:
- Shut down Domino
- Uninstall FP1
- Restart OS without Domino service starting after restart
- Do the FP1 upgrade again
- Enable service again and start Domino

This is actually how I have always done it on Windows, but it was not needed on Linux before.

In the future this is how I will do it on all platforms :-)

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Recently at a customer I had made some changes to a solution. I was running HCL Notes V11 and everything ran fine on my PC.

Soon an office complained about some code had stopped working.

I had upgraded a script library to a newer version of Apache POI for working with Excel files in some agents.
First I thought it was some compiling that hat gone wrong, but it turned out to be the script library had some files missing, soon fixed and all was well.

However what I discovered was I had been running V11 and the customer V10 and the reason for me not getting the errors was that Apache POI version 4.11 is now included in the V11 release.

As you can see here:



Which is super great !

It is because Notes attachment viewers now converts files and show them in the browsers from V11 and on, and Apache POI is used in the process.

So what I would like to know from HCL ... is this a permanent change?
Can we count on this being a part of the Notes client in the future?

Read More

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