Limitations of Lotus Notes ListBox fields

In a previous article I wrote on how to work with Lotus Notes ListBox fields. Unfortunately these type of fields have a major drawback, their limit of only 32 kb of text. So if you want to display thousands of entries you must use an embedded view. This is an small example of using an embedded view in an form, that shows how to retrieve the selected documents or currently highlighted in the view and process those documents:

Sub CopyDocuments(itemName As String)
	Dim session As New NotesSession
	Dim db As NotesDatabase
	Dim uidoc As NotesUIDocument
	Dim uiview As NotesUIView
	Dim doc As NotesDocument
	Dim tempDoc As NotesDocument
	Dim dc As NotesDocumentCollection
	Dim item As NotesItem
	Dim uiw As New NotesUIWorkspace
 
	Set db = session.Currentdatabase
	Set uidoc= uiw.currentdocument
	Set doc = uidoc.Document
	Set item = doc.GetFirstItem(itemName)
	Set uiview = uiw.Currentview
	Set dc = uiview.Documents
 
	'add currently focused document from the embedded view
	If (dc.Count = 0 ) Then
		Set tempDoc = db.GetDocumentByID(uiview.CaretNoteID)
		Call dc.AddDocument(tempDoc)
	End If
 
	Call uiview.Deselectall()
	' process the selected documents
	Call AppendDocumentsToList(item, dc)
	Call uidoc.refresh
End Sub

First we get the current view in the workspace using uiw.Currentview. This returns a NotesUIView class that has an property called Documents that represents the documents selected(checked in the selection margin) in the view.

If there is no document checked in the embedded view(dc.Count = 0) the currently highlighted document will be used.

After retrieving the document(s) we need to process them. In this example some data from these documents are copied  in a ListBox field for displaying. However this code will work correct if it is placed as an action in the embedded view.  So you can create an Lotus Script agent that uses this code and  is called from the a view’s action.  If you try to put this code outside the view(into an button click event for example) you will get an “Object not set” message meaning you have no NotesUIView object.

When working with large number of documents is crucial to be able to search the documents. In order to do this, in the view that is shown in the embedded view you must have an hidden column set as first column. Having this hidden column, when the view is focused and you start to type a “Starts with…” dialog will be opened and on enter key press,  if there are documents with fields matching your criteria they will appear first in the view. If you want to search on multiple fields you can set the embedded view to use different views with different first hidden column.

Another problem that I had was in the AppendDocumentsToList procedure when the embedded view used different views. After processing the documents I wanted to refresh the form to reflect the changes but calling uidoc.refresh caused Lotus Notes client to crash. This issue appeared only when I was using multiple views.  It seams that it is a bug when you use an embedded view in an dialog box. Moving the call to uidoc.refresh out of AppendDocumentsToList code and placing into the CopyDocuments fixed the problem.
References:
IBM Lotus Domino and Notes Information Center

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