Spanky's Place

While trying to help me figure out a PIA problem with DDE yesterday, one of my co-workers found this on IBM's site: IBM LO58909.

Yes, you read it correctly. Using nested subforms can crash DDE. Wow. I don't know about you, but to me, this is a big deal. If you think it is a big deal to IBM, and that perhaps they have top men working on it right now, you are sadly mistaken:

Problem conclusion
A programming error was found but will not be corrected. It will be a permanent restriction.

Very interesting. This isn't a big enough deal for IBM to bother fixing. It is their product after all, and they do have limited resources. If they're not going to fix this bug then there must be a simple work around, right? Wrong again:

Local Fix
Do not use nested subforms.

Whaaaat? They can't be serious, can they? Do not use nested subforms.
Wow.......I am just....stunned.

Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps this just isn't that big of a deal. Perhaps I'm just overreacting. Perhaps I'm the only developer out there who uses nested subforms on a regular basis. Perhaps using this technique is a newbie mistake. I've only been a Notes developer for 16 years -weaning myself from nested subforms must be something that just comes with experience.

Effectively ceasing all maintenance development on thousands of production applications can't be that big of a deal, right?

For those of you who do use nested subforms, I offer the following options:

1. Freeze the design of all your existing applications. Do not use nested subforms for all future development. Tell your users that their existing applications must remain as they are, and that no future enhancements will occur. Your users will probably complain, but who cares what users want?
2. Migrate everything to XPages. XPages rock and are awesome! Everything else ever created sucks and should be replaced anyway. Start planning your migration now. Your users will love the new UI, and I will appreciate your consulting dollars. --Seriously though: if you are considering migrating to XPages then do yourself a favor and find out how we can help.
3. Do not use nested subforms. This means changing your current development patterns, re-working all templates for future development, and completely re-developing any existing applications you have. I realize this is not going to be popular and may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it is the IBM recommended Local Fix.
4. Use computed subforms. Yes this is a PIA and involves very similar effort to the previous option, but it avoids a complete re-design of pretty much every form and subform in your arsenal. Instead of actually embedding the nested subform(s), use a computed subform formula. The up side of this is that DDE won't crash. The down side is that your application will now run slower than before, but who cares about performance?
5. Downgrade to an older version of DDE. I do almost all of my development in VMs, and very rarely need to "bust out DDE" on my main work environment. So I can use the latest / greatest Notes Client for my non-development work, and then fire up a VM with version of Notes installed appropriate for that development engagement. This allows me to effectively support any client who might still be using older (even really older) versions of Notes. Replication and design refresh still work just fine. The only real down side with this solution is the licensing costs for the various clients and OS installations for all of the VMs. This solution -while not optimum, will work. Unless of course you want to work on an NSF that uses both XPages and Nested Subforms. In that case you're screwed.