I want to add logging capabilities in my Lotus Notes application. Basically I want to be able to log who make the change, when the change is made, and what field(s) is/are changed in a document. What is the best way to do this? I am thinking to also add this at the end of each document so the user knows who make the changes.
OpenNTF has several tools for this purpose that you could use, including Open Audit and Audit Manager.
I've done this before using LotusScript. It's a bit of a pain, but the basic idea is to:
Create an array or new document object within the QueryOpen event, and store the values for all the items in the current document.
In your QuerySave event, compare the values of the current document to the in-memory copy you made, and then log any differences.
You can create a field on the form to write these changes to, and just append to it each time.
Watch out for other event handlers that make changes everytime the document opens, though. You may need to copy original values in the PostOpen event, for example, if you change some fields in the QueryOpen event each time the doc opens, otherwise you'd get false change logs.
Hope this helps!
A "brute force" approach can also work. Every time a document is saved, create a copy of that version to a (separate) database. This will build an audit trail of the documents. The documents can be compared to extract the changes.
There is quite some overhead in this approach, but in my experience it has been worth it. The implementation is simple and all changes are captured without affecting the actual document. All information that is needed is captured and available for (offline) processing.
Related
I'm new with lotus notes. Basically, I have a form. I want to create a situation where when I edit the form, that form will not be overwritten but it will automatically create a new form with an updated form. But when I open the new updated form, we can see all list of history from the old form. I can't think of any way to create it. Any suggestion would help me. Thanks!
First of all: you need to know the difference between FORM and DOCUMENT.
The FORM is the design element in designer that you create and that is used to create and modify DOCUMENTS.
A DOCUMENT is a set of item - value pairs stored in the database. The items are based on the FORM it is created with.
If I understand you correctly, you want to create a new DOCUMENT on every save but keep the old DOCUMENT at the same time. There is a function called "Version Tracking" that allows this.
Read this documentation about how to use versioning. Here is a short version:
Open the form.
Choose Design - Form Properties.
On the Form Info tab, select None or one of the following versioning methods:
New versions become responses
Prior versions become responses
New versions become siblings
I have a field on one of my base page types which I need to update programmatically from an external data feed, so that it can be included in my Smart Search index.
The documents are versioned, but I want to update the published value of this field regardless of checkout state, and obviously avoid any sort of overwrite when documents are checked in.
The field will not appear on the editor form -- or ideally, would conditionally display for Global Admins.
It appears that using the API to update the document without doing a CheckOut fails silently. However if I do a Checkout/Update/CheckIn on a checkout-out page, the author will lose their work I assume?
Any way to handle this "versionless" field via the Kentico data model and API?
I don't think there is a way around updating checked out pages. You can update the page type table directly, but as you mentioned, it will be overwritten when they check in. You could update the version history I believe to make changes to the current data that is checked out, but again, I think that will be lost if the user cancels.
The only way I can think of to solve your issue is to create another table that maps the values you want to the page. Then you don't have to worry about the pages being checked out, you just need to grab the documentID or something. Since the value isn't displayed to the editor, you just have a field that does a lookup on this table.
The preferred and right way is using the API but as you stated, it causes problems if a user has something already checked out and working on it or it's in workflow and not published yet.
If the field you're updating is page type specific, there is one thing specifically I can think of and that's going directly to the database to the page type's database field and perform an update to that field.
Note: this is not recommended unless you know specifically what you're doing and have done full testing on it
The down side of going direct to the database is this will not update the current version since you're using check in/out and workflow. You will also need to update the checked out and current version which means you need to:
Go to the Document itself in the cms_documents table and get the document you are working with.
Then using the fields DocumentCheckedOutVersionHistoryID and DocumentPublishedVersionHistoryID' you can get the version history IDs of the document from theCMS_VersionHistory` table.
Then you can perform an update to the CMS_VersionHistory and your custom page type fields.
You will then need to look in the CMS_WorkflowHistory table and find out if that document is in workflow and in what step.
After you have that workflow history step, use the VersionHistoryID field to go back to the CMS_VersionHistory table and update that record with your data.
Again, not an elegant solution since you are using check in/out and workflow but after some trial and error and testing you should be able to figure it out.
UPDATE
You may also be able to add a custom table or some other linked database table which will allow you to create a global handler. The linked table would be where you perform your updates via API and other calls without versioning or workflow. Then when a user updates a specific page type you could do a check to see when the last time that linked table was updated and update the field(s) you need on update of that particular page (of course by node and document IDs).
Unfortunately you'll have to check it in and out with API. See examples here.
Also you might need to publish it in order to reflect changes on the live site.
I have searched for current solutions, but can't find a set of guidelines or examples as to how to achieve the following:
The original requirements involved models with required fields, so we included annotations to those fields. As usual, there is a last-minute change and we are being asked to allow the users to save drafts. These drafts must allow the user to save the forms without any of the required fields.
I would like to know what the best practices for this problem are.
Solutions I am considering, but I accept they might be a hack (and that's why I am asking the experts)
If the user clicks "Save as Draft" I can capture the fields that have information in another ActionResult and run basic validation on those fields. Since there is a chance that required fields are missing, I am thinking in storing the captured info in a temporal model (without any required annotations). If the user decides to edit such form, I can populate fields in the view with the temp. model until the user clicks on "Submit"
Another option is to remove all required annotations and run client-side validations... but am wondering on the amount of work required to do so.
Any thoughts are very much appreciated.
Just have 2 save methods. 1 which is called from the autosave and 1 that is used to submit the process. In the autosave method do not check if(ModelState.IsValid).
Whether you choose to save the incomplete objects to the same table or a different table is your choice. In a relational world I would likely use a separate table, in a non-relational world I would use a singular object collection.
This will allow you to keep the same set of original models. There is a very high cost to duplicating your models, there are certainly times that warrants pass by value/copy but make sure the cost of mapping is there. In this situtation I do not believe there is value in mapping, except perhaps at the persistence level if you need to map to a different object because of an ORM's constraints.
There is deep value in these partial forms. Recording this on the server will allow you to apply analytics to learn why your users abandon your processes. It also gives you the ability to follow up on users who leave incomplete forms such as sending a reminder (nag) email.
You don't want to save anything to your database until it is complete. Having a duplicate table where everything is nullable is cludgy as hell. Before HTML5, the typical path was to save the information to the session, which you could then pull from to refill the fields, but that's requires having a session with a relatively high expiry to be useful.
Thankfully, HTML5 has local storage, which is really the best way to handle this now. You just watch for onchange events on your fields and then insert that value into local storage. If the user submits the form successfully, you destroy the local storage values. Otherwise, you attempt to read those values from local storage when the page loads and refill the fields.
See: http://diveintohtml5.info/storage.html
There's pretty broad support, so unless you need to worry about IE6 or IE7, you won't have any issues.
Another option (depending on your data obviously) would be to comply with the database but not the model. By this I mean ignore Model.isValid and disable Javascript validation on the front end but then satisfy the database table. In a form, you mostly have:
textboxes - default to "" or " "
checkboxes - easy true/false default
radio buttons - one is probably already selected
dates - default to DateTime.MinValue (or DateTimeUTC)
enums - default to 0 (usually for 'unspecified')
Hopefully you are also saving a flag designating that it is in Draft state so that you know you need to interpret the 'null codes' you have set when it comes to displaying the semi-populated form again.
I have scripts that react off of, for example, a client Recalc client event. For example, on my form I have a subtab that users may add or remove items from. Based on actions on this subtab (housing a child record of the parent) I would like a field on the parent to update (say to show a total from the children records).
As I was saying, these events seem to work fine if in edit mode but they do not work correctly in view mode. (even in view mode these child records have a "Delete" option at the end of each row in the subtab. This was provided by netsuite by default.
I wondered if anyone had any tips to best allow this parent field to update real time while in updating the subtab rows with the form in view mode.
Thanks.
You can make a custom field on the parent (header) whose value is determined by saved search. For instance, make a saved search that totals the line values by transaction. Be sure to make it filter by transaction in the Available Filters tab. Make the search public so everyone can use it.
Create the custom field that sources the total from the saved search. Make sure to uncheck the "Store Value" checkbox, as you don't want to store the data, you want to reference the search results. You do this on the Validation and Defaulting tab. You'll see a field for Saved Search there. Choose the search you created above.
As you remove/add/change lines on the transaction, the field updates accordingly. In essence, you don't need a single line of code to make this work - it's all in how you create the search and the custom field that references it.
I have a similar situation posted here.
The NetSuite team answered me by email, and it happens you can't really achieve this on the view mode: some API methods are not available. Their suggestion to my case (and I think it applies to yours too) was really to force a refresh on the whole page.
Of course, you can always achieve this accessing the DOM elements directly, but this isn't a best practice, as your code can stop working if these elements change on a version update.
I had the same problem, I'm not able to restrict on view or remove edit button. But, there was one alternative solution with workflows, you can deploy workflow on child record edit mode restrictions, then if the user clicks edit on view then the record will not be available to edit. This concern will apply to custom record as well.
I'm currently writing an application that moves Notes documents between databases based on the amount of days that have elapsed from the creation/modified/last accessed dates. I would just like to get ideas on a simple and convenient way to create documents with specific dates, without having to change the time on the Domino server, so that I could test out my application.
The best way I found so far was to create a local replica and change the system clock to the date I want. Unfortunately there are problems associated with this method. It does not work on the modified date - I'm not sure how it is getting the modified date information when the location is set to Island (Disconnected) - and it also changes the modified and last accessed dates when the documents are replicated to the server replica.
Someone suggested trying to create a DXL of the document, modify the date time in the DXL file, then import it back into the database as a Notes document; but that does not work. It just takes on the date-time that it was created.
Can anyone offer any other suggestions?
You can set the created date for a document by setting the UNID (which is fundamentally a struct of timestamps, although the actual implementation has changed in recent versions). Accessed and modified times, though, would be unsettable from within the Notes/Domino environment, since the changes you make would be overwritten by the process of saving the changes. If you have a flair for adventure and a need to run with scissors, you could make the changes in the database file itself either programmatically from an external application, or manually with a hex editor. (Editing the binary will work -- folks have been using hex editors to clear the "hide design" flag safely for years. Keep in mind that signed docs will blow up badly, and that you need to ensure that local encryption is off for the database file.)
There's actually a very simple way to spoof the creation date/time: just add a field called $Created with whatever date/time you want. This is alluded to in the Notes C API header file nsfdata.h:
Time/dates associated with notes:
OID.Note Can be Timedate when the note was created
(but not guaranteed to be - look for $CREATED
item first for note creation time)
Obtained by NSFNoteGetInfo(_NOTE_OID) or
OID in SEARCH_MATCH.
Unfortunately, there's no analogous technique for spoofing the mod or access dates. At least none that's ever been documented, as far as I know.
I imagine given how dependent Lotus Notes is on timestamps (for replication, mainly), there isn't an API call that allows you to change the modified, created, or last access dates of a note. (More on the internals of Lotus Notes can be found here.)
I dug around the Notes C API documentation, and found only one mention on how to get/set information in the note's header, including the modified date. However, the documentation states that when you try to update that note (i.e. write it to disk), the last modified date will be overwritten with the date/time it is written to disk.
As an alternative, I would suggest creating your own set of date items within the documents that only you control, for example MyCreated, MyModified, and MyAccessed, and reference those in your code that moves documents based on dates. You would then be able to change these dates as easily as changing any other document item (via agents, forms, etc.)
For MyCreated, create a hidden calculated form field with the formula of #CREATED or #NOW. Set the type to computed when composed.
For MyModified, create a hidden calculated form field with the formula #NOW, and set the type to computed.
MyAccessed gets a bit tricky. If you can do without it, I suggest you live work with just the MyCreated and MyModified. If you need it, you should be able to manage it by setting a field value within the QueryOpen or PostOpen events. Problems occur if your users have only read access to a document - the code to update the MyAccessed field won't be able to store that value.
Hope this helps!