Domino Designer sometimes showing no design elements - xpages

I'm using IBM Domino Designer 9.0.1. I have a server locally installed, and I have an ODP project associated to the nsf. Recently I've been opening Domino Designer to have it completely forget the nsf elements (have a look at the picture). Preferences/General/Workspace is set to 'Refresh automatically' and Build automatically is turned off.
I've tried: Refreh (no effect), Build (no effect), Sync (Progress bar gets filled with 'Updating File Menu based on Navigator Filter' but no progress).
The only thing that seems to work is re-associating the ODP to a new nsf.
Anybody have anything similar? Should I just reinstall Domino Designer? Because, you know, that's just loads of fun!

I had a similar issue but with an older version of Designer (8.5 or 8.01). Currently at 9.01 and haven't had the issue. I believe I had to rebuild my /workspace to solve the issue.
I found another similar issue with 8.01 in the Notes forum. You didn't mention if Processing indications (green circle and status bar bottom right) showed anything going on in the background.

delete your workspace directory under Data. it saves your day

Related

IBM Domino Designer stuck on 'Sync with ODP...'

I am using GitLab in combination with Sourcetree. Every time I want to commit something, I would go to my Domino Designer and right click the database, click Team Development and use 'Sync with ODP...'.
Most of the time everything works perfectly fine but sometimes the synchronization dialog pops up and just wont go away. In my Sourcetree I can see that some files are waiting to be commited but those files are not all.
So the dialog shows up, wont go away and says "Progress information" "Exporting..." and thats it.
There is no "use in background" button there and the 'cancel' button is disabled.
At this point the only thing I can do is to shut down the Designer using the task manager but the problem still wont go away even after restarting my computer and VirtualBox which I am working on (The designer runs on the VM). The only thing that changes: It sometimes gets stuck "later" in the progress.
I have read the designer hangs often due to automatic synchronization. In my case this feature is disabled.
Is there someone who can tell me what causes this problem and how I can fix it?
- Thank you in advance
(The synchronization is in progress for roughly four hours now, with no change)
Are you able to track it down to a specific design element? If there is a corruption in the DXL, the export to the ODP will probably fail. In Package Explorer you can use the "Open With..." right-click menu option to open as XML. Similarly, using the menu options to export as DXL might also highlight any corruption in DXL. Also, is the NSF local or on a server. If it's on a remote server, that may impact the performance of syncing to an ODP (which will be local).
We are using Domino Designer and Sourcetree in combination with Mercurial and Bitbucket for about a year now.
We suffered a lot of difficulties: "hanging" sync, corrupted custom controls, missing files, lot of stress etc.
What I did find out: most of the syncing problems have something to do with the file IconNote in the resources.
Sometimes the associated source contains another version of this resource, so it creates an IconNote.orig. Whenever this file exists, the syncing will go wrong. I guess that IconNote.orig isn't allowed in Resources and so the syncing stops without any warning(!) and often corrupted files.
It took me a very long time find out, but now I know: If IconNote exist in the Git, I delete it instantly! Syncing goes well aftwerwards.

Domino Designer not syncing properly

In a rather complex project the entire project team is encountering more and more problems regarding designer, like frequent crashes, exceeding of memory limits and- most annoying - problems with outdated project data:
quite often we observe that two different designer clients are showing different versions of project data (see below for a rough description of the environment).
A simple example: an hour ago a co-worker asked me to open and test a new Xpage she had created 15 minutes ago in her Designer. In my Designer client however the new Xpage was not present yet. right-clicking my application and hitting "refresh" brought up the new Xpage.
The problem hits the ceiling with design elements that we both are working on in turns (as in "are you currently working on xpage XXX? I'd like to add..."). So with this syncing delay the problem is obvious: If I foirget to manually sync my project before adding stuff I will overwrite the co-workers' codings.
We never had this problem before, although I have to admit that we never had to work in a team on such a massive project.
Here's the setup:
all designer clients are 9.0.1 FP6
everyone is working on the same project stored on the same server
everyone is working on the same network withion the same building, just door-to-door
Is there something we could do or check to improve this situation?
Lothar, you have stated three problems at once. I'll try dissect them.
Frequent crashes:
We experienced many, many crashes in our daily work after upgrading to Windows 10. I know it sounds silly, but one way it worked for us and successfully mitigated those crashes was installing IBM Designer into C:\IBM\Notes, instead of C:\Program Files\IBM\Notes.
Granting 'Full Access' to 'All Users' over that folder was also necessary.
Exceeding of memory limits: As jtomas correctly pointed out, default memory settings are not enough for heavy xpages development in Domino Designer. I would suggest going to vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx1024m.
Problems with outdated project data: I think there is no workaround for this problem because there is no problem. Domino Designer 9 is a Eclipse based software, and works like so.
Think about it: When working in Java projects, developers download (checkout) source files from a Source Control System (SVN, Git, etc) and work them locally. Whenever a developer modifies or create a file, another developer can see it only if:
a) The modified/new file has been uploaded (commit) to Source Control Repository; and
b) Other developers have synchronized (refresh) their local projects with the repository.
See, that's how Java development works and that's the way we should do it too. Upon opening a NSF file, Domino Designer breaks it down into many files, just like a Java project. Once locally saved into the Java Virtual File System, those files get updates only when you refresh the project. Silly, but it is what it is.
My recipe to a well succeeded Domino development team include:
1) Design locking: All developers must explicitly lock elements they will work on. We don't rely on implicit locks.
2) Communications: All members of the team must be immediately notified whenever a developer has made major updates to the project.
3) Source Control: Despite its pitfalls, we rely heavily on SVN as code repository. It's far from perfect, and merges don't work properly, but it's better than no control.
Hope it helps.
I'm not sure this will fix your syncing issue but I have found modifying the following 3 lines in your local Notes\framework\rcp\deploy\jvm.properties file to help with Designer performance when developing in XPages especially with large projects:
vmarg.Xmx=-Xmx512m
vmarg.Xms=-Xms48m
vmarg.Xmca=-Xmca512k
These are the memory limits I use. You can increase the limits just make sure they are a multiple of 4. You have to restart Notes & Designer for changes to take effect.

Changes to XPages application not shown

Server: Domino 8.5.3 / Window 2003 5.2
We have a strange Problem. Since a few days, we cannot apply changes to our XPage application. Even, if we make some few text changes and open the application, the changes are not displayed. We looked into the generated XPage-Java-classes, here we can see, that the changes were applied to these classes.
Also, we tried to create a new Test-XPage, but if we open this xpage, the error "404 item not found" is displayed.
We also tried this http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21327454 but it doesn't help....
We have already restarted the http task and the server.
It looks very much like your XPages don't compile anymore. You can check that by opening the Navigator view in the Domino Designer and check webContent/web-inf/classes. Every XPage translates into a Java class and it seems that has stopped. You can try the Project menu option "clean" and you want to right click on the nsf and check the project properties if a builder has been disabled or is missing.
Next stop: reinstall Designer. Since the compilation happens in Designer, that's where you need to look

xPages Designer Team menu is missing

I was installing source control in the xPages / Domino designer and screwed it up. In trying to repair my flawed install, I've somehow removed the "Team" designer menu option.
Can anyone tell me how to get the "Team" menu option in designer back?
Thanks in advance,
-- Jeff
99% of the time, deleting the workspace folder will reset everything (back it up somewhere in case you need the stuff in it).
This will resolve issues caused by most broken plugins.
I assume you are in the package explorer because Team is only displayed there.
What I try is to do a reset perspective that can be found in the window menu.
One thing that I wasted a lot of time on was not being able to find the "Team Development" menu in the Navigator pane (your "normal" Domino Designer view of databases). The trick is to select the XPages perspective... ;-)
/John

Dragging and dropping datasource fields in xpages causes designer 8.5.3 to crash

I am having an issue with Designer 8.5.3 crashing when I try to drop and drop fields from the data palette on to a custom control or an XPage. Occasionally the drap and drop will work, but with no apparent reason or consistency. Most of the time(98%) designer crashes.
I am currently using Windows XP on a corporate imaged laptop.
I have errors similar to the one below listed for the databases that I have tried to work with.
The project was not validated due to "Can not create a Resource at the location : jnsf:/Local/databasetest.nsf/bin". Fix the problem, then try refreshing this project and validating it since it may be inconsistent databasetest.nsf Unknown JavaScript Problem
I have read a related post and tried the suggestions, but they did not seem to work. Any help or pointing in the right direction would be greatly appreciated!
Have you opened a PMR with IBM yet? If not, do so an supply them the crash logs, dumps, ...

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