Scary Notes/Domino Bug
Strange thing to come back to after a long silence, but here's a scary bug that's already been fixed. It strikes me as severe enough that it should get a lot of attention, but it hasn't!
Here's a description. It's SPR# AMON6DZJRW .
Now, what they tell you is that modifying fields at both ends of a document set to "merge conflicts" will generate a conflict anyway, due to the creation of a field called "OriginalModTime." What they DON'T say is that if you set them to "merge/no conflicts", the following takes place...
Let's say I have a document with fields A and B. That doc is in sync between the server and my client.
On the client, I ADD field C.
On the server, I ADD field D.
Now, it seems appropriate that the behavior would be to end up with a document with fields A, B, C and D.
But that's not what happens. Instead, I get a doc with fields A, B and D (or C, if that update was later). But C is just gone. From both copies of the doc.
This has already been fixed. I just tested with 7.0.1 and got the expected behavior of all 4 fields.
One might argue that the danger comes from refusing the conflict; that it's my fault that the data was lost because I refused the conflict. Fair enough. I'm not claiming there wasn't a contribution stemming from the setting on the form. But to a long-time Notes developer, the notion of a conflict on a field value that simply doesn't exist on the other document is, well, just wrong. And apparently someone agreed, given the behavior in 7.0.1 (and 6.5.5)
So if you're working on a highly distributed application that uses conflict merging and you (like I do) try to generate NotesItems on an as-needed basis, watch out for this one!
Comments
Posted by Chris Linfoot At 09:29:15 AM On 04/06/2006 | - Website - |
We have the Merge/No Conflicts property on all our documents.
I do not know yet what is the source of our problem but since it is similar to yours ... we loose almost ALL the fields of the form except 7-8 fields!! This happens on both replicas and we cannot retrieve the document from any replica.
Do you think it is similar behaviour as the one you mention?
Posted by Mariam At 07:59:21 AM On 12/16/2008 | - Website - |