Some time ago Nathan Freeman blogged about making Domino Designer work the way you want, lots of excellent productivity tips for improving performance of Domino Designer. One of these was to turn off Build Automatically.
If you ever, ever, for any reason whatsoever, ever, ever, ever open a database that’s on a server in Domino Designer – switch it off. Ninjas kill kittens when you don’t (hat-tip to Rocky Oliver for that metaphor, originally used for not adding Option Declare in LotusScript, equally heinous!)
I’ve blogged before about some challenges with doing this, namely that everything works as expected if you open a database in Designer, run Build All, then make a change, run Build All.
However, if you open a database in Designer, make a change to a design element, then run Build All for the first time, you don’t see your changes. You need to run Build All a second time.
But Build All will build any database open in Designer, regardless of whether the Working Set containing it is visible or not. And there’s no shortcut for Build Project.
Today, Thimo Jansen and I were discussing something else in Domino Designer and we had both forgotten that shortcut keys can be assigned in Domino Designer (something Thimo made me aware of on my last blog post on the build process). It’s available in the Preferences, under General – Keys.
However, as Thimo noticed before, there are some further issues with using Build Project. What I’ve found is that running Build Project from the Applications view or from an XPage itself does not initially update the Java class for that XPage (and hence the class file that actually runs on the server). Instead, you need to go to the Package Explorer view, select the database, and run Build Project from there.
Once you’ve made a change to an XPage or Custom Control, gone to Package Explorer and run Build Project, it then works as expected for that database. You can happily make changes on any XPage, run Build Project from the XPage, and the browser will pick up your changes.
However, if you open another database in Designer, you need to repeat the process for that database. Running Build Project from the Package Explorer before making a change doesn’t work. You need to make a change, then run Build Project in the Package Explorer.
But from the Designer Preferences you can set up a shortcut to get to the Package Explorer view. As well as the Controls view, the Outline view and any other you wish.
And don’t forget to export your preferences. Here’s a link to the blog post for that.
While I have loved 99% of the recs in that post, we’ve run into too many problems without Build Automatically. Build Project wasn’t enough to see our changes. We’ve responded by having to Clean before we see the changes. Thanks for this post as an alternative. (We can do this because the server is on the local network.)