Design Applications to Optimize View Performance

View performance is an important topic for any Domino developer. Because of the nonrelational nature of Lotus Notes/Domino, views can pose performance challenges when designing applications, especially enterprise applications with large amounts of data and/or a large number of views. Nevertheless, there are steps you can take to maximize performance. Some of the steps you can take to maximize performance include the following:

• Do not record unread marks— Located on the Advanced tab of the Database properties box, this option causes the database to not mark documents as unread, which increases application performance and reduces disk space.

• Minimize use of categorized columns that display multiple values— If the column formula returns multiple values in a categorized column, the same document is displayed multiple times in the same view, which negatively affects application performance.

• Designate more than one column for sorting in views— Allowing users to re-sort views by different columns increases application performance and reduces application size by reducing the need to create additional views to sort the documents.

• Reduce the usage of Evaluate actions for every document change with context-sensitive actions— A new feature in Lotus Notes/Domino 6 is the capability to create context-sensitive actions. This enables you to set hide-when attributes to display/hide actions based upon a document state or formula. In addition, the view setting to Evaluate Actions for Every Document Change causes the context-sensitive actions to re-evaluate when the user clicks on documents in the view. Although this is a handy feature, using this feature slows application performance.

• For Web-based applications, reduce the number of documents displayed in the view— Taking this step reduces the amount of data being displayed in the browser and decreases page loading time.