The solution:

1) Create a new Numeric field, Computed for Display, Hidden, and with Value set to @ThisValue (or HideMyRTF if you are using an earlier release than ND6)  Lets call this field HideMyRTF in this example.

2) Set the Hide-When formula of your existing Rich Text Field – lets call it MyRTF in this example – simply to HideMyRTF (meaning if HideMyRTF is True then hide MyRTF)

3) Add some LotusScript using the NotesRichTextItem EmbeddedObjects property to the Forms QueryOpen event. This will check if there are attachments or text in the field:

Dim rtitem As NotesRichTextItem
Set rtitem = source.Document.GetFirstItem( "MyRTF" )
If Isempty(rtitem.EmbeddedObjects) And Trim(rtitem.Text) = "" Then
    source.Document.HideMyRTF = 1
Else
    source.Document.HideMyRTF = 0
End If

That’s it.

It was a long time since I did any Lotus Notes development so I’m a bit rusty. I’m sure I’ve come up with this or a similar solution in the past but I could not find any when searching so I had to start from the beginning.

This was for an existing app that has been around for quite a few years so there is no way for me to control anything from the beginning. I guess I could have used an agent to set some stuff but this would most likely cause tons of replication conflicts as there are tens of thousands of documents, still being updated by users and replicated across several servers.

Done with a Lotus Notes 7.02 client (I told you it’s been a while…) but should work on older and newer releases.

I have previously used several other algorithms that use a view to sort the collection, these however have the drawback that they become very inefficient (i.e. slow) as the number of documents in the view used for sorting grows. The solution presented below does not have this problem.

It has been developed and tested in Lotus Notes 6.5.3 but should work in all ND6 (release 6) and possibly earlier Lotus Notes releases too (if you test this successfully or unsuccessfully write a comment to this post and everyone will know).

Example of use:

Dim fieldnames(0 To 2) As String
fieldnames(0) = "SKU"
fieldnames(1) = "OrderDate"
fieldnames(2) = "Client"
Set collection = SortCollection (collection, fieldnames)

Function to sort DocumentCollection:

Function SortCollection(coll As NotesDocumentCollection, fieldnames() As String) As NotesDocumentCollection

' ------------------------------------------------
' --- You may use and/or change this code freely
' --- provided you keep this message
' ---
' --- Description:
' --- Sorts and returns a NotesDocumentCollection
' --- Fieldnames parameter is an array of strings
' --- with the field names to be sorted on
' ---
' --- By Max Flodén 2005 - http://www.tjitjing.com/
' ------------------------------------------------

End Function


(This article is previously published and has been moved to this blog)

[Update: Instead of using Evaluate and @Sort in section 2 in the code you can of course use any of your favourite sort routines. Or search the Net for one, there are many out there.]

Problem:
When creating a memo from backend Lotusscript and then showing it to the user using the frontend/UI classes, the user email signature (if enabled) will be inserted at the top of the document, i.e. the body text will be below the signature instead of above it as expected.

Solution:
Disable the signature and then re-enable it as shown in the following code example.

Limitations:
This is only an example on how to disable the user email signature. If you want it inserted at the end of whatever your email contents is (in this example “Hello world!”) you can easily modify the example to read the signature from docProfile and then insert it.

Pre-requisites:
This has been tested in Lotus Notes 6.5.3 but it should work both in previous releases such as R5 and in the later ND7 release.
Write a comment if you have confirmed this working (or not working) in other releases.

Below is a code example that
1) creates a memo using Lotusscript backend classes,
2) disables user email signature,
3) shows the memo to the user using Lotusscript frontend classes, and
4) re-enables the user email signature

Please note that the NotesRichTextItem Update method used in this example is new in ND6.


' ------------------------------------------------
' --- You may use and/or change this code freely
' --- provided you keep this message in your code
' ---
' --- Example by Max Flodén 2005
' --- http://www.tjitjing.com/
' ------------------------------------------------

'Re-enable signature in users mail profile
If strProfileEnableSignature = "1" Then
docProfile.EnableSignature = "1"
Call docProfile.Save(True,False)
End If