Tweak The Auto-Populated Groups Feature In Domino 8.5.3
Category Undocumented Domino Features Lotus Domino 8.5.3
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Back in 2008, we found this great blog post on eknori.de on how to "Tweak The Auto-Populated Groups Feature In Domino 8.5". It describes a very elegant solution that does not require any modifications to the existing design elements in pubnames.ntf. Although most likely not supported by the IBM, this works great and we have implemented it in our environment with great success. By the way, I'm still unclear why IBM does not include this in their template..., maybe someone knows the reason?
We are now testing out the new 8.5.3 release and I noticed that after upgrading our test Domino server to this new version and replacing the design of the Domino directory with the new template, this stopped working. Although the subform "Custom | Autopopulate99" is still in there, the Group form no longer offers "Custom" as a choice in the "Auto Populate Method" field".
After comparing the new and the old form and subforms embedded in it, I noticed the following differences:
1. Formula inside the computed hidden field "SubformsList" on the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform has changed from SubformsList (field was referencing it's own value) to "Home Server|1".
2. Postopen and Postmodechange events on the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform no longer contain this code:
...although the Sub GenerateSubFormsList is still in "(Globals") without any changes to its code from the previous release.
Once I made these two changes to "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform in our customised uwinpubnames.ntf, the "Custom" auto-populate option was back and working again. So that is one way to fix it. Unfortunately, we are now forced to make changes to the existing design element in the original Lotus template (sorry, I meant IBM template). Luckily, this was not an issue for us, because we are not using an out-of-the-box pubnames.ntf. We actually have implemented many more modifications to the original directory template over the years, and we use our own customised version of it. Yes, this means every time new release of Domino comes out, we have to port all these customizations after creating another copy (not replica) of the newly released pubnames.ntf, but it doesn't realy take up that much time. The drawbacks associated with this extra chore are outweighed by the benefits of our customisations.
In the end, I removed any code from the Postopen and Postmodechange events on the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform so that Sub GenerateSubFormsList will NOT be called to populate the "SubformsList" field (I explain why in the last paragraph). The only change that I made to the 8.5.3 version of the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform was to replace the formula in the computed hidden field "SubformsList" on the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform from "Home Server|1" to "Home Server|1" : "Custom|99"
So the question is why was this changed by IBM in the 8.5.3 pubnames.nst template? I think the answer may lay in this IBM technote:
LO56189: ADD GROUP AND EDIT GROUP PERFORMANCE SLOW, TAKES 30+ SECONDS TO COMPLETE
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1LO56189
I suspect that the culprit of the slowness reported by some customers was the code in the Sub GenerateSubFormsList, that's why in the new template IBM decided to bypass it.
Bookmark :
Back in 2008, we found this great blog post on eknori.de on how to "Tweak The Auto-Populated Groups Feature In Domino 8.5". It describes a very elegant solution that does not require any modifications to the existing design elements in pubnames.ntf. Although most likely not supported by the IBM, this works great and we have implemented it in our environment with great success. By the way, I'm still unclear why IBM does not include this in their template..., maybe someone knows the reason?
We are now testing out the new 8.5.3 release and I noticed that after upgrading our test Domino server to this new version and replacing the design of the Domino directory with the new template, this stopped working. Although the subform "Custom | Autopopulate99" is still in there, the Group form no longer offers "Custom" as a choice in the "Auto Populate Method" field".
After comparing the new and the old form and subforms embedded in it, I noticed the following differences:
1. Formula inside the computed hidden field "SubformsList" on the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform has changed from SubformsList (field was referencing it's own value) to "Home Server|1".
2. Postopen and Postmodechange events on the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform no longer contain this code:
...although the Sub GenerateSubFormsList is still in "(Globals") without any changes to its code from the previous release.
Once I made these two changes to "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform in our customised uwinpubnames.ntf, the "Custom" auto-populate option was back and working again. So that is one way to fix it. Unfortunately, we are now forced to make changes to the existing design element in the original Lotus template (sorry, I meant IBM template). Luckily, this was not an issue for us, because we are not using an out-of-the-box pubnames.ntf. We actually have implemented many more modifications to the original directory template over the years, and we use our own customised version of it. Yes, this means every time new release of Domino comes out, we have to port all these customizations after creating another copy (not replica) of the newly released pubnames.ntf, but it doesn't realy take up that much time. The drawbacks associated with this extra chore are outweighed by the benefits of our customisations.
In the end, I removed any code from the Postopen and Postmodechange events on the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform so that Sub GenerateSubFormsList will NOT be called to populate the "SubformsList" field (I explain why in the last paragraph). The only change that I made to the 8.5.3 version of the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform was to replace the formula in the computed hidden field "SubformsList" on the "$GroupInheritableSchema" subform from "Home Server|1" to "Home Server|1" : "Custom|99"
So the question is why was this changed by IBM in the 8.5.3 pubnames.nst template? I think the answer may lay in this IBM technote:
LO56189: ADD GROUP AND EDIT GROUP PERFORMANCE SLOW, TAKES 30+ SECONDS TO COMPLETE
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1LO56189
I suspect that the culprit of the slowness reported by some customers was the code in the Sub GenerateSubFormsList, that's why in the new template IBM decided to bypass it.
