In March this year I talked about using a scheduled nightly agent to update the selection formulas of views which show documents based on dates.

It's a tip I've come to rely on in all databases I've created since. The one drawback is that I sometimes forget the view's selection formula is controlled by an agent and change them directly, only to find the change is lost the next day. Doh. To avoid confusion I modified the view-updating code to add an obvious warning about this.

Here's the new code:

Dim TodayDateTime As New NotesDateTime(Now)

warning = |REM "WARNING: THIS FORMULA IS UPDATED EACH NIGHT BY AN AGENT. 
ALL CHANGES WILL BE LOST!";
|

Set view = db.GetView("FutureEvents")
selection={SELECT Form="Event" & EventDate>[}+
        TodayDateTime.DateOnly+{]}
view.SelectionFormula = warning + selection
Call view.Refresh

Set view = db.GetView("FutureMeetings")
selection={SELECT Form="Meeting" & MeetingDate>[}+
        TodayDateTime.DateOnly+{]}
view.SelectionFormula = warning + selection
Call view.Refresh

The result is a view that looks something like this:

Hopefully this will prevent accidentally making the change that and forgetting it actually needs to be done in the agent itself. Well, I say agent, the change should ideally be made in the Script Library called from the agent -- see the second tip in the blog I linked to above.

Notice that the code in the first entry I wrote about this didn't include the SELECT keyword in the selection formula, but that this code does. It's inclusion appears to be optional and Notes will add it if you don't If, like here, you're adding code that's not part of the selection (the REM) then you need to add the SELECT otherwise the REM gets wrapped inside it.