Before I start this blog can I ask that it doesn't turn in to a discussion about the accuracy of the this next statement --- of all the things that Domino is bad at it is particularly bad at handling attachments. Working with files in the browser is nothing short of a nightmare and an area that needs some serious thought on Lotus's part. Take a quick look at the posts on the Notes.net forum and see what I mean. I continually get asked questions about working with attachments. Two emails just yesterday.

As a developer it's often a case of knowing of the things like this. In this case both undocumented and one of which (%%Detach) only came my way via a chance email from a Lotus employee.

Anyway, enough controversy, on to something more useful. Earlier this week I got asked if I knew a way to elegantly handle the removal of files people upload if they are deemed too large. My initial (lazy) response was to suggest using the server's POST request size limit. This is anything but elegant though as it generates an error 500 and the user should never have to see an error! Instead I set about finding a better way. First using @Functions and then using LotusScript. As far as I know neither have been done before, although I have a horrible feeling somebody is about to prove me wrong. Here's what I came up with:

Notice that there is a limit to the number of bytes you can upload. One megabyte in this case. In this shot I've just tried to upload something larger and it's telling me I can't. It works fairly well and I will try and write the article and make it available sometime today or over the weekend I've written an article about it. Hopefully, if one person asked, lots of people want.

Note: I toyed with the idea of placing a replica online for you to play with but I though better of it. While it limits the size of files there's nothing stopping you sending huge files my way and I don't want server performance to suffer. So you'll just have to wait ;o)