Monthly Archives: March 2015

Lotus Notes

Lotus Notes – Text field “Summary” flag

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Here is a recent challenge.  I have field in a Lotus Notes database that contains a log of activity that has happened to a document.  Due to additional functionality and user requirements (isn’t it always the way) this field now, in some cases, overflows.  The error states “32K limit exceeded”.  In fact I think the limit is a lot less.  The limit is set due to the “Summary” flag field the field being set to True.  To see this flag check Doc Properties, choose a text field, and check “Field Flags” which should have “SUMMARY” after it.  With this flag set the field can be used in views.

Bob Balaban wrote a good post about his experiences with the Summary flag and how the 32K limit can be a lot less depending on various conditions.  He also shows some example code about how to set the Summary Flag to False to allow more text to be saved.  The trick is to clear the flag before saving the document.

Now off to do some coding…

Technology

Hex dump of a file in Windows

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(Without installing any software).

Here is the scenario.  You are remotely connected to a server overseas.  You are looking at a text file and want to understand what is separating the various segments of a received HL7 message (or want to look at the contents of any file for that matter).  You could download a hex dump utility and all will be sweet – but in the case upload times could be a problem and you might not have permission to install software.   There must be a way!

Of course there is … thanks to Google and this post which details how to use Powershell to process and dump a file character by character in hex.  Have a look for the response referring to Powershell and add in the change to alway print a two character hex number – keeps things nice and evenly spaced.  Thanks to user “wmz” and www.superuser.com.