Truncated document follow-up
Why can't I do follow-up on a truncated document?

This one's from a year or two back. Apparently, follow-up on truncated documents in 6.5 had occasional corruption issues. It was pulled from 6.5 quite late in the development process because of this, and the intention was that it would be fixed in ND7. It certainly it works in the ND7 beta 3 release.

NotesDatabase.Search return order
What's the returned order from NotesDatabase.Search? The help file says it returns, "An unsorted collection of documents that match the selection criteria." Is there a rhyme or reason of any kind to the returned order.

This answer comes from Jon Champlin: "It looks like the order is just defined by the physical location of the document within the database (which can change with documents being added/deleted, and the database being compacted). There's no guarantee what order you'll get them back in for this type of search." So when they say it's unsorted, they mean exactly that. And of course, a collection made before a compact may well be returned in a different order to one made after a compact.

Null date values
Why does copying a null date give a 31/12/1899 value? I wrote about this in the December 2004 issue of DominoPower Magazine, see http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue200412/00001462001.html.

Again from Jon Champlin, "Sounds like a bug to me. You should open a support call so we can get it fixed." Which I will do.

Address dialog
Why does the address dialog show ACL-only (Access Control List) groups?

Again, this one's from a year or two back. The response to this was, "Does it?" It seems this is another fault, and one that's been in Notes as long as I can remember, probably back to the R2 days. I also note the ACL dialog shows mail-only groups. Equally silly. Or maybe even more so, because a mail-only group may contain names that will never work in ACL-SMTP mail addresses for people outside the organisation. It seems this one is also a fault; it's still in ND7 beta 3, so I guess I need to raise this one on a support call too.

Background replication
This is another old one. If you switch locations, and that location specifies a different Notes ID, background replication no longer works until you restart Notes.

I spoke with Maureen Leland on this one. She accepted it as an issue, so I guess I ought to make yet another support call. It seems strange that I can discuss apparent defects with the developers at Lotusphere, but then I have to make the support call. Pity they don't do it direct. Anyway, the issue here is that background replication throws up an error, but you can foreground replicate the database just fine.

Document scores
How does Domain Search determine document scores?

In exactly the same way as a regular full-text search within a single database.

And what's that?

Notes uses the well-known TFIDF (Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency) scoring method, according to John Curtis. There are many places on the Web where you can find this discussed, try http://archimedes.fas.harvard.edu/presentations/2002-03-09/img13.html for just one location, but basically it's: