Authors field populating with current user name

Question

I have a form in which I have an editable authors field. When I open that form in Lotus Notes client the authors field gets populated with current user name. If I set the Default value of the authors field to name of authors field (either in computed or editable mode) then this does not happen. I am using Lotus Notes 8.5.3.

Why does this happen? Is this a normal behavior. I guess, this is something very, very basic but I have encountered this for the first time.

I'm a little unclear about your question. Are you saying that you have a field called "MyAuthors" and the default value is set to MyAuthors? Is this a new field that you have recently added to the form? If so, are there existing documents that were created before the field was added to the form? What is the behavior when you create a new document? What is the behavior when you save a new document and immediately re-open it? Assuming that this is a new field, what is the behavior when you edit an old document? And most importantly: what do you want the behavior to be in all these cases? — Richard Schwartz
Lets say I have a field "MyAuthors" in my form which is editable. If I open the form in Notes client, then current user name is shown in it. If I set the "Default value" of "MyAuthors" field to "MyAuthors" then it doesn't show the current user's name in it. What I am asking is that is this behavior normal? It doesn't matter whether the document is new or old OR the field has been recently added or not. The behavior remains the same for old & new document. This behavior does not happen with Readers field. — Naveen
The default value formula only applies in two cases: the document is new, or the document is old but the item does not exist in the saved document. In both cases, if the default value formula is the same as the field name, then it is normal behavior for the field to come up as blank -- because in both cases there formula is reading the value of the item, which doesn't exist yet. — Richard Schwartz
The unusual thing about authors field is that if it has no default value formula at all, then it is treated as if it does have a default value formula of "@Username". I honestly don't know whether it has always been like this, or if they changed it at some point. As Ken points out, it does make some sense, but it is definitely different from the way other field types are handled. If you always want the current user added to an authors field, then use the formula "MyField : @Username". — Richard Schwartz

Ken Pespisa Ken Pespisa · Accepted Answer · 2012-06-14T18:20:39

That behavior is normal, and it makes sense when you think about it. The value in that Authors item will be the list of users/groups that have access to the document. If the field wasn't editable or didn't get altered in any other way and a user comes in, creates a doc, and then saves, that user would then no longer have access to it (assuming Author rights here).

So it makes sense to put the creator of the document in that field so they will have access to it by default.

Authors field populating with current user name

1 Answers