I’m going through the rules in a SmartForm and associated views to squash a bug, when I came upon an Execute a Form method action in the When the Form is Initializing rule.
Trouble is, the method to call is the Initialized method.
Would that even work?
Last August I wrote a post about how a column in a list view was excluded from SmartForms’ Quick Search because the column wasn’t displaying the field directly — it was displaying a data label via an expression.
I ran into a similar-but-not-really-similar situation today.
I’m working for a client new to the world of software development and unencumbered by familiarity with development lifecycles and environments. (Not their fault; it just places the onus on us to teach them.) I’m not sure how long my company has been working with them; I just joined the project a couple of months ago.
Somewhere in the past, some percentage of the developers on the project acquiesced to doing development work in their production environment, probably because they were asked to do so to help them with some tight deadlines or urgent requirements. The short term effect was that it helped the client meet whatever deadlines or requirements they had; the long term effect is… disastrous.
I’m working on re-creating a SmartForms application for a client — which was already in progress when I took over for another engineer — when I bumped into the exception described in the the title. This application was deployed from another environment.
Where’s the problem?
It’s over.
The upgrade evolution across four environments and two months is finally complete. And I learned something about the process I want to share: Thanos doesn’t come to visit.
My client has just completed upgrading their K2 blackpearl and K2 SmartForms software from version 4.6.11 to 4.7. Here’s something I learned about how SmartForms behavior has changed in version 4’s final minor release.
I think it’s fair to say that most of us in this industry at least started out taking over someone else’s project. The original developer left long before you got there, leaving you to figure out what’s what.
Some of us are still in that position, or find ourselves back in that position at some point. So if you can take the time to inventory all of your SmartForms objects at the start, you can let your shiny new object relational management (ORM) database do a lot of your grunt work for you later on.
One of my client’s users came to me with an unusual situation — he could reach the SharePoint pages that host the SmartForms application, but none of the SmartForms would appear. Instead, this MacBook user saw messages that read, “The webpage at {URL} might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.”
The user works in a remote office, and uses the application infrequently, as needed.
What gives?
Yesterday my client presented a problem he was experiencing in Chrome that I could not reproduce in IE 11. The issue, as it turned out, had to do with how SmartForms rules are executed through different browsers.
At some point, you might find yourself getting confused by fields with similar names or identical names from disparate sources. It happens.
Start Rule 
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