Ethan Codes

The problem I had was that a database sent to us by a client had almost every design element marked “Prohibit design refresh or replace to modify.” That meant that applying the new database template for testing wouldn’t work, because all these old design elements would be sitting around screwing things up. Now, you can uncheck that option, but you have to do it manually and that’s tedious. I wanted a way to do it programmatically.

I found out about this tool (Lotus Notes database application) that you could download which would tell you all of the design elements in a database. That got me started. After some more research on (what used to be) notes.net I found out the field that I need to look for to see if that option was check, and what value it would contain if it was checked.

So I modified the free tool. I made a copy of the default example form, and changed it so that instead of showing all of the design elements in a specified database, it would only show those flagged with that “Prohibit” junk.

The next step was to make a copy of that one and change it so that it actually changed the flags so that the design element was no longer marked to “Prohibit” modifications. When that worked, I was pretty excited.

You can download that Lotus Notes Database here, and enjoy it all you want, but I make no promises or guarantees. Use it at your own risk.

Here’s a function I use when I have an agent processing a LOT of documents.

Function progressBar(sofar As Double, total As Double) As String
	' this function returns a string progress bar
 
	percent# = sofar / total
	pint% = Cint(percent# * 100)
 
	pBar$ = "["
	For i% = 0 To 100 Step 10
		If (i% < pint%) Then
			pBar$ = pBar$ & "#"
		Else
			pBar$ = pBar$ & " "
		End If
	Next
	pBar$ = pBar$ & "]"
	pBar$ = pBar$ & " " & Cstr(sofar) & " / " & Cstr(total)
	progressBar = pBar$
 
End Function