View opening cancelled

We're half way through doing an upgrade from Notes/Domino 7 to version 8.5.3. Although we've run into a couple of issues, for the most part it's been fine. Last week produced one of these said issues, which I thought I'd share since there was a total of one topic in the IBM forums. Needless to say, the suggested resolution was attempted by our Admin chap in vain.

As mentioned in a previous blog, we provide a number of packaged applications to our clients. These are really stable, as they've been out in the field for a number of years now, and have successfully migrated to newer versions of Notes without any issues, until now that is.

We've had a number of users upgrade successfully and none have picked up any issues with their existing applications. Then we got one! This user could not open a particular view called 'My Records'. They kept getting the message: "View opening cancelled. To see this view, you must close it and then re-open it". Obviously, this suggested action did nothing.

Delving into the design revealed that the view in question was in fact a 'Shared, desktop private-on-first-use view'. That's when the light bulb went on. My guess is that the particular view, which is stored in the user's desktop file, had gotten a little messed up during the upgrade. As the design is set on first use, the only way to fix it, is to get the view to think it's the first time the user is opening it again.

The solution for this is to get the user to remove the icon from their workspace, which prompts the user asking if they want to delete x number of private views. Answering 'Yes' will remove the view designs from the user's desktop file. Getting them to re-open the application will trigger the view design to be added back to the desktop, all shiny and new.

And Voila! No more issues.