Bless You! I was just thinking about this today actually, in the context of “hey, I wonder if a Lotusphere session on Profile Documents would be useful”. I use them all the time, but mostly in Notes client applications, and mostly the values are set using Lotusscript. I’m a little fuzzy on why, but I seem to recall that inappropriate caching is less of a problem than if values are set with @functions.

This tip might be something to incorporate into a “Configuration Management” panel for a database, whereby certain changes made within that interface would automatically trigger the sending of this console command to the server. You could even prompt the user (power user probably) as to whether the change is needed right away.

Any sense how big a performance hit you take if you had lots of profile docs that needed to be recached? I would imagine it to be almost trivial – perhaps another second or two loading a web page the first time afterward.

Hmmmm. So, if you’re not going to use profile documents for configuration lookups, are you just falling back on dblookups, or some other technique?

This all got me thinking anew about what the performance considerations were regarding profile docs, and a quick search came up with this compilation of general performance tips from Julian I hadn’t seen before: http://www.nsftools.com/tips/PerfTips.htm“ rel=”nofollow”>http://www.nsftools.com/tips/PerfTips.htm

So, either I’ve turned you back onto profile docs, or you’re going to tell me about some cool new technique I’ve never tried <img src="http://www.11tmr.com/11tmr.nsf/emoticons/DLYH-5MZVLY/$FILE/smile.gif“>.

“…it’s worked well for me over the years.”

Something to be said for that. Another advantage of keeping things “mundane” is that you never know who’s going to work on the app next, and the more transparent the code the better.

I’m actually wrestling with this question now in the context of planning how to design a relatively straightforward “standard db architecture” (a la Openslice) that would be readily grasped by a novice developer. The question “Should I use profile documents?” depends on how problematic they might be given they are “hidden”, and potentially confusing for that reason. If you say “use them”, then do you count on them to not get corrupted and use @Command([EditProfile]), or do you create “real” documents and then save values to profiles in the querysave? I hear newbies asking “the querywhat?”.

Fun stuff <img src="http://www.11tmr.com/11tmr.nsf/emoticons/DLYH-5MZVLU/$FILE/wink.gif“>

4 years on and this tip is still being found useful! Thanks Matt.