I use source control on every single Domino database that I work on. Often because I want a database under formal change control so that I can relate individual change requests to the changes made in the source code. But also mainly to cover my backside. When I make a mistake (and it is when, not if), having my database under source control allows me to recover things quickly.
If you’re new to source control in Domino Designer, I have made a video available which walks you through my workflow.
But that’s not the point of this post. I have found that when there are 20 or 30 databases each under source control that I spend a lot of my day with Designer hung and displaying this dialog box:
After a cry for help on Twitter, Julian suggested I try turning off automatic sync. I should have known there was a setting for it, but it never occurred to me to look. There are hundreds of configuration settings in Designer preferences, and to be honest I try not to touch them as in my experience they tend to break things more than make them better, but in this case, if you go to Preferences -> Domino Designer -> Source Control and make sure that the “Enable automatic import/export…” options are unchecked then you should find Designer is more usable.
Of course you then have to remember to right click on your database and choose Team Development -> Sync with on disk project to manually force a sync, but that is a habit I can get used to.
That’s a great tip, but one gotcha to be aware of (I fell into it myself). If you open a database in Designer, deselecting these options means it doesn’t automatically open the referenced on-disk project. This really threw me, because I was sure I had set up source control, but the Team Development context menu only gave options to set up source control or associate with an on-disk project. But I was sure I already had an on-disk project, but couldn’t remember the name.
Once I opened the relevant on-disk project, the Team Development (right-click) context menu gave the options I expected.
Again, not a huge pain because I can temporarily re-enable the settings if I really need to. But it threw me for a little while.
Excellent tip matt. That dialog box had led me to disable source control, since it was driving me craaazy.
This is useful also because I have run into the scenario where automatic syncing was checked, but was not actually syncing. At least if I know it is off and I manually sync it, I won’t ASSUME it is being synched (sunc?) when it isn’t. If that made any sense at all.