Why Your Domino View Header Is Forever Off by One Column: Passthrough-HTML Black Magic

Inherit an old classic-web Domino view and you'll often find the column headers sitting one cell to the right of the data — and nobody knows why. A field report on the passthrough-HTML tricks hiding in twenty-year-old view designs: square-bracket HTML in column values and titles, spacer columns, per-row checkboxes, and the real culprit — an intentionally unclosed <input tag that swallows the </td><td> boundary and merges two columns into one cell, shifting every header after it.

When DQL Says "Domino Query execution error": A Diagnostic Ladder

A DQL query fails and you get "Domino Query execution error:" followed by a wall of text. A field report on reading that message: the number 4854 you'll find in Err is useless for diagnosis (every DQL failure returns it), and the answer is always in the detailed-reason line. Covers the four-segment message structure, a three-rung ladder (catalog / view-never-built / partial TIMEDATE), the design-catalog corruption that makes queries work intermittently, and the 0-docs-no-error checklist.

DQL View Date-Column Lookups: Three Ways a Type or Time Zone Silently Eats Your Results

"Converting the column to a date, some documents match and some don't — weird." A field report: a DQL view-column date query that returned inconsistent results turned out to have three independent causes. DQL never auto-converts types (so the column's output type must match your query term), the source field held mixed text/date values, and @dt without a time-zone offset is UTC — which corrupts boundary documents without changing the total count. Two verified fixes, tested 6/6.

NotesXSLTransformer: Transforming XML and DXL with XSLT in LotusScript

NotesXSLTransformer applies an XSLT stylesheet to XML or DXL and writes the transformed result — the last piece of Domino's XML toolkit alongside the DOM and SAX parsers. This article covers session.CreateXSLTransformer and its three sources, the stylesheet-must-be-a-stream rule, the pipelining model that chains DXL export → transform → import with no temp files, and the error handling that works through the Log property and On Error, not events.

NotesJSONNavigator: Native JSON Parsing in LotusScript, Without the String Surgery

Before Domino 10.0.1, parsing JSON in LotusScript meant Evaluate tricks or hand-rolled string surgery. NotesJSONNavigator replaced that with a real parser: session.CreateJSONNavigator gives you a typed tree you navigate with GetElementByName, GetNthElement, and JSON Pointer paths. This article covers the navigator, the element/object/array classes, the type constants, and the naming surprises (GetFirstElement not GetFirstItem; AppendElement takes value-then-name).

Managing the Full-Text Index from Code: CreateFTIndex, UpdateFTIndex, and the Local-vs-Server Split

FTSearch needs a full-text index to be fast — and to support wildcards and relevance ranking — and NotesDatabase can create, update, and remove one from LotusScript. The catch is a split almost nobody expects: CreateFTIndex / UpdateFTIndex / RemoveFTIndex work on LOCAL databases only, while FTIndexFrequency is server-only, and server indexes are actually managed by the Updall task (updall -X rebuilds, it doesn't create). This article covers the options bitmask, the create-vs-update distinction, and that split.

Document Locking in LotusScript: Lock, LockProvisional, and the Prerequisites Everyone Forgets

Domino can lock a document so two users don't edit it at once — Lock, LockProvisional, UnLock, and LockHolders on NotesDocument. But the methods raise an error unless locking is enabled on the database (IsDocumentLockingEnabled) and a master lock server is configured, persistent vs provisional locks depend on that server being reachable, and locks don't work in web apps at all. This article covers the API and every prerequisite.

NotesDocument.ComputeWithForm: Running Form Validation from Code — and Why It Won't Stop Your Save

ComputeWithForm runs a form's default-value, input-translation, and input-validation formulas against a back-end document — the programmatic equivalent of a user saving on the form. But three things surprise people: it returns a pass/fail flag it never enforces (it happily lets you Save an invalid document), input translation can rewrite your field values, and it silently falls back to the default form unless you pin the Form item.

Response Documents in LotusScript: MakeResponse, ParentDocumentUNID, and Walking the Thread

Domino's parent-child document hierarchy — main document, responses, responses-to-responses — is built and traversed with a handful of NotesDocument members. This article covers MakeResponse (and the Save you must call after it), ParentDocumentUNID for walking up to the parent, and the Responses property, whose one load-bearing limitation is that it returns only immediate children — so a full tree needs recursion.