Lotus Notes Designer 8.5.2 - Corruption problems

David Clover  2 September 2010 04:05:04 PM

We've been using the new 8.5.2 Lotus Notes xpages Designer client for a week now, and it's clearly a significant improvement on 8.5.1. However, we have also found some very annoying intermittent bugs so I'm mentioning them here as a source of reference for the community in case anyone else can reproduce them (we know at least one commercial developer who can).

Using Lotus Domino Designer 8.5.2 to edit relatively simple XPages using the Design GUI view, some operations are corrupting the source code of not just the edited item, but also the rest of the page. We're not certain exactly what combination of operations is triggering the problem, as it’s intermittent and can’t  be reproduced every time, but it seems to occur after random drag-and-drop or cut-and-paste (note: not copy-and-paste) operations.

The resultant code has several properties duplicated - not the parent elements themselves, but properties of them such as (but not necessarily limited to) eventHandlers, selectItems, this.rendered switches, values and valueLists. The duplicate code is identical to the (still present) original code, up to and including the object IDs, but it is added at the end of the parent element’s code block. The Designer then (correctly) reports numerous problems with the XPage, and cannot compile it. Cleaning up the code is not too difficult (though it is laborious) as the problem is always a chunk of duplicated code, and double-clicking the error message selects the entire duplicate, whereupon it can be cleanly deleted.

At least one person has reported something which seems to be related: http://trunc.it/ap8hb . Many advanced XPage designers are editing the source code directly rather than using the Design GUI, which may be why this hasn’t been reported widely.

The attached image shows the error pane and partial source code of a page which has suffered from this problem. The page was syntactically correct beforehand, then after a cut-and-paste of a piece of text in the GUI, this was the result.

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