How can you get a “Type Mismatch” error in a Forall loop in LotusScript? This was the question a few of us hit with a recent bit of coding. You can’t declare the forall variable, and if you’re iterating over a variant containing only strings, surely this shouldn’t happen.

Over the weekend we lost another long-standing member of the Domino community, Nathan T Freeman. Nathan was outgoing, often controversial, but passionate about open source and helping others. Everyone who met him will have stories about him. But I know he is one of the individuals I have to thank for being where I am today.

In my last blog post I talked about challenges we had to overcome as a team with regard to caching of constants. But a bigger challenge we hit was caching of design elements. Part of the solution we built required copying design elements from one database to another. Part of the beauty of Domino is that everything is a Note - including design elements. Design elements are just Notes with a special flag. So just as you can copy a document from one database to another by getting a handle on the note, you can also copy a design element from one database to another by getting a handle on the design note.

Recently I’ve been involved in a project with a lot of LotusScript. As a team our approach has been to structure the code according to best practices and leveraging what we’ve learned from other languages. Standards are always good, but there are always peculiarities that impact what you do. The crucial skill is to be able to work out what is happening when the standard ways don’t produce expected results. And most importantly, work out how to work around them.