Tool up for a career in Notes

"I became a faster developer once I had scanEZ; I didn’t have to go hunting around for bits of code snippits and I didn’t have to go and reengineer things”

You might say that a happy accident led John Cawrey to Ytria tools. It was about six years ago when he was self-employed developing applications for small businesses and start-ups. He already was a seasoned Notes developer (he started back in the R4.5 days) and skilled troubleshooter but on this one day he found himself stuck. “It was one of those problems where you couldn’t just write an agent to fix things or write an agent to un-do what was done,” he remembers.

“As any developer knows, there are times that you do something very silly with code. I inadvertently ran an agent on two separate servers, something that went and modified many thousands of records—I ended up with all sorts of replication conflicts and all sorts of mess,” he adds. “So I searched for tools to help me on forums and that’s when I learned about Ytria scanEZ.”

Once he realized what this early version of scanEZ could do, John rented the software for five days and set about tackling his data issues.

“It solved all my problems and helped me avert a catastrophe—it let me inspect records, group them in batches and fix all the various things that went wrong,” he recalls. “And I have to say the rental option was a perfect way to get acquainted with scanEZ.”

Taking the plunge

Old habits die hard, so after his extraordinary Notes issues were dealt with and his scanEZ rental period expired, John went back to doing things the old way—at least for a little while. Seeing a full demo helped him make up his mind about the tools in a hurry.

“Shortly after renting scanEZ, I attended an ILUG meeting in 2006 and that’s where I had a look at the rest of the tools,” he recalls. “It became obvious that this was something that was just worth buying—any self-employed developer should have scanEZ, there’s no reason anyone who develops or maintains applications should not have that tool. And clearly if you’re a commercial developer and you’re going to make money off of your applications it’s just a cost of trade, you pay for the best tools it’s as simple as that.”

Lose your delusion

Though he’s a full-fledged convert, John still understands the thinking of those Notes pros who don’t think they need a tool like scanEZ:

“As a developer it’s very easy to just say to yourself: ‘I’ll write an agent for this and another agent for that, along with any views you need to add to run the agent against’” he explains. “And some developers are more efficient than others when it comes to keeping databases of reusable bits of code and whatnot. But actually, when you have a tool like scanEZ you just know that you don’t need to write any agents like that—you don’t need them. You can modify data very, very quickly without having a specific agent or without having to rework old code.” He continues, “it’s more like running a query in MSAccess to obtain a dataset and then running an update query to modify data. In fact, you can do searches in scanEZ that you just cannot do in a Notes view, date related searches, @formula comparison searches. When you just want to know how many documents match several criteria you would normally have to create a view with a specific selection formula. In scanEZ you just search, and then decide what you want to do with the results. Exporting data is simple too, do a search, export to excel choosing whichever fields you need. Great for those ad-hoc reporting requests you’re constantly bombarded with. This is a tool for database managers, not just developers.”

But what if you write agents very quickly? Would it still be worthwhile to use scanEZ for a given task?

“Could I write an agent that would do the same thing at the same processing speed? Yes probably, but it would take me 10 or 15 minutes to write that agent and if I’m doing this—let’s say even once a day—in the long run that adds up to many hours,” he explains further. “With scanEZ you just don’t have to do this. Just fire up scanEZ, do a ‘search’ and do a ‘modify field’ and you’re done. All those 15 minutes add up. Adding new fields and default values to documents, changing data-types, deleting temporary fields, working with soft-deletes—it’s all trivial with scanEZ”