Over the last few days a colleague of mine has been doing some XPages development. We’ve come across a couple of interesting bits of functionality that might not be obvious.
The first was when working on an old database and creating a View Control for a view called vwSite. The View Control brought in columns for information that was not in the view my colleague was using. After further investigation, there was another view with the same alias that was also being picked up. The View Control was effectively joining the two views. The problem was quickly rectified, but it does offer up an interesting use case that may be of benefit at some point in the future.
The second was that he had been developing locally on a laptop, and needed to put the database on our main development server. The application was not on the web but was opening fine on the Notes Client. The reason it was not opening on the web was that the server was Domino 6.5.4, not Domino 8.5.1. Thanks to the expertise of Paul Hannan, I now know that the 8.5.1 Client has its own XPages runtime, so can open an XPages database on the client regardless of the version of the server it’s sitting on. This can allow you to deploy an XPages application for use in the Notes Client if a customer has 8.5.1 Clients but has not yet upgraded their servers to 8.5.1.
I had the view issue happen to me also. It really freaked me out! I could not figure out where the extra fields were coming from… Then I found that I had copied the view and it retained the same alias.
-John