Formula

Inspired by some of the posts in the DeveloperWorks forums and on StackOverflow, I thought I would post some more basic concepts and how I handle them. I am not saying my way is the best way, this is just what works for me. I am sure there will be more posts in the future"..." I will also mention a few other things I noticed while reading the code posted in the forums.   Retrieve something that doesn´t exist The question is how to identify what dates there are no documents created for. This is where lists are very useful. Richard Schwartz answered this question and posted some good code. Rich suggests to create a list of dates, with each list item having an initial values of false, and then loop through the documents. As each document is processed, the value of the corresponding list item is changed from false to true. You can then go through the list and see which dates still have a value of false, those dates are missing documents. My version of the same code is to actually delete the list item you have a match for, instead if setting it to true. In the end you have a list of just the items of dates without a corresponding document.   Write readable code This could be a blog entry all by itself. But I notice that much of the code in the DeveloperWorkds forums is hard to read"´". Partially because any tabs or multiple spaces used for indenting the code is stripped out, but also because the posters don´t write easy-to-read code. Variable names are often not descriptive: Dim db1 As NotesDatabase Dim db2 As NotesDatabase vs Dim thisdb As NotesDatabase Dim nabdb As NotesDatabase Which one is easier to understand? In my opinion (and I am sure you agree) the second variant. Also function names and other variables should be named so you understand what they do and what kind of data they contain. Comments are mostly non-existing. It is not that hard to add some comments to the code that explain what the code is doing. But don´t explain every line of actual code (it should be self-explanatory, if variables are named correctly), explain what a particular section of code is intended to do. Here is a section of code from an agent I wrote earlier this week: '*** Read PhotoUNID field in LossControl document'*** and build a list of the UNID values in the fieldphotoUNID = lcdoc.GetItemValue("PhotoUNID")(0)If photoUNID<>"" Then '*** Create array of values and put into photolist tmparray = FullTrim(Split(photoUNID,";")) ForAll t in tmparray If t <> "" Then photolist(t) = t End If End ForAll End If The comments above will help the next person to look at the code to quickly understand what it is intended to do.   More on variables Use Option Declare/Option Explicit. This will find many errors, especially for more inexperienced programmers, where variables are misspelled or missing, something that is a very common…