Worth mentioning about Domino Designer and SourceTree...

I have (as so many of you experts out there) jumped on the SourceTree bandwagon.

In the past I used Bitbucket and Mercurial directly from Domino Designer (DDE). This actually worked pretty good for me, so why change?

Well: I was of course fascinated by SourceTree's ability to help you with merging...


But my message today is not about merging, but to praise the extra control I felt when dealing with SourceTree!


When working with SourceTree there a big part of the application workspace is dedicated to showing you which files you have modified (see below).

When working with some changes to our (Inforte) system for time accounting, billing etc. I knew I had edited at least 5 files, but only 2 of them was shown as modified...

I tried to manually sync the ntf with the on disk project (ODP) several times. Nothing happened...


I checked the date stamp on the files that should have been modified in the ODP, but they all had old dates...

I almost panicked! (I guess the only reason for not doing so was because my kids had just gone to bed...)

When I came to my senses I restarted DDE and (of course) after having synced again all my modified files were available for commit. :-)


So; When in doubt, restart Domino Designer!

NotesItem.IsProtected: How has this wonderful feature passed me by for so many years?

Last week I needed to do some batch processing on the person documents in Domino Directory. So, as any other decent person would do, I created an agent.

When testing the compared fields modified by my agent with similar fields in a document not modified, and noticed that an item property "PROTECTED" was not set...

After a little investigation I found this wonderful security feature. The "Must have at least Editor access to use" field property prohibits a user with Author access to the document to edit the field. The property is available to all kind of fields.

I instantly thought of several applications I have made in the past that could have needed exactly this functionality. Because of me being not aware of this I chose different, and more time demanding techniques, to achieve this.

The item property is available using Lotusscript, Java or Javascript as well, so there you have 3 more reasons why I should have seen it but didn't...

I have not (yet) tried to explore how XPages cope with this, but since Java and Javascript supports querying and setting this property it's supported for sure. If any of you reading this knows more about this feel free to comment.



Last: To my defense I asked two of my dry capable colleagues if they knew about this feature. Lucky for me they didn't so I feel I'm not a complete jerk. And that fact makes it even more important to bring this information to the masses... :-)

IBM IHS error: mod_domino: apr_socket_connect, could not connect to Domino Server

I just had a problem getting IHS to communicate with Domino 9.0.1. The IHS error.log stated the following:

mod_domino: apr_socket_connect, could not connect to Domino Server

I browsed the documentation and found:

The Domino HTTP server only accepts connections that originate from the same computer. By default, mod_domino uses the local loop back address of 127.0.0.1 to connect to the Domino HTTP server. Both server processes must run on the same computer.

When IHS is installed as a part of Domino the Domino HTTP task listens to port 9288. I figured I needed to find out which IP addresses the HTTP task was listening on port 9288 on. Netstat is good at this and revealed the following:

TCP    10.201.17.12:9288      0.0.0.0:0             LISTENING

Domino was listening on port 9288, but not on the loopback address.

Suddenly it struck me that I had to add localhost to field in the server document where you specify the host name(s) Domino HTTP task listens to.

I added localhost, restarted the Domino server and voila!