So it’s not even 10am and I’ve learned my thing for the day. It’s amazing that there are these little nuggets of information which have passed me by all these years.
I was trying to delete a document from a web database this morning. I had accessed the document via the “0” view so the URL looked like http://myserver/mydb.nsf/0/[unid]?opendocument which of course worked fine. So what I told my user to do was just replace “opendocument” with “deletedocument” but he kept on getting an error. “Stupid bloody users” thought I, “Can’t even type a simple URL parameter”. But then I tried it and, shock, horror I got an “Invalid URL Exception” error returned as well. To be honest I was a little stumped but of course notes.net put me straight with the answer. You cannot use the “deletedocument” command against an unsorted view and it appears that the “0” view is indeed unsorted.
It’s good that there’s still stuff out there to learn, even if I should have known that a long time ago.
Actually, the sorting doesn’t matter. In fact, the only requirement is that the view you are deleting from exists. The document doesn’t even have to appear in the view. In fact, it can be a folder which is even better since a view consumes some resources on the server to keep its index updated. What I have done in the past is just setup a dedicated hidden folder called something like “(Delete)” and then, when you want to delete a doc you just call db/(delete)/unid?DeleteDocument.