|
|
|
|
|
One of the objectives of List Fields is to be a successor of the old tool NNTEDIFF.DLL.This section describe what NNTEDIFF was.
First we take a look at the built-in field-list allready in Lotus Notes called Document Properties. Document Properties are easily accessible by right-clicking on a document either from a view or from a document. You see the document properties below;
The Document Properties are presented in a little dialog box, and you can see all kinds of information here. It is generally very handy, and easy to use. One of the major disadvantages with Document Properties is the fixed size of the dialog box. You can't resize the dialog box so you have to do a lot of scrolling both to locate the fields and to see the contents. Finally you can't really manipulate the content other than copy it to the clipboard.
With Document Properties available, would you ever need any other tool ? Many people say yes! What if you want to compare fields from multiple document, for example in order to resolve a replication or save conflict ? Then Document Properties gets cumbersome to use.
Back in the Lotus Notes release 3 and 4 timeframe, Lotus shipped an undocumented tool called NNTEDIFF. It was shipped as a Dynamic Link Library (DLL) and you had to install it manually in the Notes configuration file NOTES.INI. When installed, it was accessible through the Actions-menu in the Notes client as Compare two documents. When you selected two documents from any view in Notes, you would get the following dialog box:
Within the dialog box above you could easily spot which field that differed between the two documents. You could also see the content of the two fields.
Easy objective and easy usage! However, NNTEDIFF could also easily crash and since it was unsupported by Lotus, you could never count on any support. A real "use it if you like it, but don't contact us if you have problems"-tool.
A final challenge was the fact that this tool didn't work at all in Lotus Notes release 5 or 6. So NNTEDIFF kind of died with release 4 of Lotus Notes.