Why should I turn off build automatically?

Rod,

Just by opening a database in designer - especially with Build Automatically turned on - can cause you to update design elements.  As a best practice you should never open a production database in designer.  You should copy it to local or a dev server and then poke around.  I know that the OpenNTF server went down because of this once.  Someone opened a .nsf in designer - signatures got updated and bam - stopped working.

Lots of people say turn Build Automatically off.  I think it depends on your situation.  Personally I ALWAYS have mine turned on.  But I always developer against a local template first and then refresh the design on a dev server.  So it's very safe for me to keep build automatically turned on.  If you don't use a local template but were coding against a dev server you should be ok leaving it on as well.  But performance might slow a bit.  IF however you shared that Dev server with other people.  Then you should probably turn it off.  What you don't want is to have it on and open a database while someone else has it on and opens the SAME database.  That's bad.  And we're talking database itself...  not just design elements.  Of as mentioned above you really want to avoid opening a database in Production with Build Automatically turned on.

That's my understanding of things at least.
Dave

David, thanks for your answer, and I understand what you're saying. 

BUT:  I have "build automatically" turned on all the time (I occasionally turn it off to build something manually, but then I turn it back on).  Sometimes I want to see what's going on in a production design, and that's usually not a problem (meaning: my design elements aren't resigned just by opening them and looking at them).  I've only had the same problem as Rod had ONE time, and I'm in the production database designs often!

I use a template to refresh the design of all my production databases.

Since this appears to be a fairly new problem, do you think this is a new "feature" of "build automatically" that was introduced in a flavor of Domino 853?  My server is 8.5.3FP6 HF1219.

I will test this theory of turning off "Build Automatically" when I open a production db. It makes sense, but because it happens inconsistently, it will take time to know for sure.

I have to say, that I prefer working in my templates with Build Automatically. Build Manually irritates me! It is two extra clicks every time I want to test a change.