iSite Blog

The problem

Observant reader may have noticed that I have gotten the dreaded "NotesException: Notes error: Relational operators are not supported in text fields"

This error has haunted me like the plague, and it happens more often than not in an iSite. I have no idea what's causing it, but scouring around the web yields results claiming it to be related to the field table that notes keeps, and apparently the ft-indexser uses this table when it generates the ft-index for a database.

Cause

This probably happened because I created a replica onto the development environment to test-upgrade this database to the new 6.1. Apparently it seems it found a LastUpdate filed without a date first, and stored this in the field table. the LastUpdate field is the field that keeps the LastUpdated information in iSite. I created an agent that runs trough the database, checking for fields without any value, or with the value set to text. It found a few documents, and I tried to set the value to LastUpdated to see if that fixes the problem, but apparently not.

Solution

The only known solution seems to be to create a new replica. (after removing all non-text variants of this field from the database)