Yes, the headline of this post is a brutal mangling of the lines from Alexander Pope’s poem, An Essay on Criticism: Part 2: “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” Perhaps I should have quoted Winston Churchill, who (allegedly) said that success is, “the ability to move from one mistake to another without losing enthusiasm.“ The point is, of course, that we all make mistakes, even HCL Domino developers. The question is: what do we do about them?
So as a Domino developer, what do you do when you make a mistake in Domino Designer? Control-Z has its place, but what if you already saved the borked design element? Unless you created a safe copy of the old version of the design element somewhere, you're out of luck. You'll have to try and remember what it was you changed, and then “unchange” it.
That is why so many HCL Domino professionals tend to develop ways to work around this issue. Typically, that means implementing a naming system for old versions of the same design element, storing multiple copies in the same database design. An example might be along the lines of:
ContactForm
ContactFormSafe
ContactFormFinal
ContactFormThisIsTheOneThatWorks
Not necessarily in that order. As you can imagine, this can lead to confusion, more mistakes, and even trash lying around in your Domino database designs.
Of course, there is a better way. Source code control systems are as old as the hills, and Teamstudio CIAO! works perfectly with Domino design elements. But not everyone wants or needs to use a full blown SCCS system.
For those people, we built Teamstudio Undo. Undo is a simple rollback tool for HCL Domino developers. Once installed, it saves versions of design elements and allows you to roll back to any previous version. If you have Teamstudio Delta installed, it'll show you the differences between versions before you pick one. And, to make it easy to understand how it works, we created a short demo video of Undo.
If any of this sounds familiar, take a look at Undo and see whether it could help you. For us normal humans who might make the occasional mistake, it could be just what you need.
As always, if you want to chat about this or any aspect of HCL Domino development or application management, click below to start a conversation. We love to chat!