Removing old fields from Notes applications

How many times have I tried to follow the documentation’s instructions, only to fail miserably and make do with’em. I’m talking about all those old unused field names, of course, which seem to want to stay around forever when you reuse an existing application as the basis for a new one. Well, not anymore…

From DuffBert’s Random Musings:

So, the proper steps to delete unwanted fields from the field list would be:

1. Delete the field(s) from all documents in the database.
2. Delete the field(s) from the design of all forms and subforms in the database.
3. Delete the database’s full text index.
4. Compact the database.
   • Copy-style compaction must be used in order to rebuild the UNK table. In Notes R4 copy-style compaction was the default on the Client and the Server. In Notes R5 and Notes R6 copy-style compaction must be specified from a command prompt.
5. • From the Domino server one would execute: lo compact database.nsf -c
   • From a Notes Client (example is for Windows) one would execute from the Notes directory: ncompact \dataparth\database.nsf -c

And it works! Just make sure you exit your Notes Client and/or Designer before running the command…