You know the problem: a user wants to save a document, gets a prompt in his face with “Unable to interpret time or date”, or whatever the other validation error, but he didn’t make any mistake. It’s been there since somebody else managed to save that document (probably due to code that saved it without validation).

What field throws the message? With a lot of trial and error, you may be lucky and find it. Or, you can do what I did this morning: I’m the happy owner of ScanEZ, Ytria’s amazing piece of software, and I found out it’s pretty easy to spot the error.

1. Open the rotten document in ScanEZ: you get an image of all fields and their values.
2. The first column displays the field type (Date, String,…)
3. If a field throws errors, it gets the type “Error”
4. Now, if you sort on field type, you can pretty easily spot the error field.

To solve the problem:

1. Delete the field.
2. Save the document again in Lotus Notes; the field is recreated (since it exists on the form).

That’s it!

Oh, and if you(r company) doesn’t use ScanEZ yet, you should really check it out, by the way ;-).