Detect and switch Domino servers from within VBA

Question

We are having issues with our mail server which have highlighted a weakness in a system that I set up a couple of years ago to email departments on completion of reports.

The code that currently sets up the mail server is hardcoded as

Set objNotesMailFile = objNotesSession.GETDATABASE("XXX-BASE-MAIL-04/CompanyName", dbString)

The problem we're having is that the 04 server is flaky at best at the moment and everyone is being routed through one of the replication servers when it falls over. Not too much of a problem for the desktop Notes clients as they handle this, but the application is simply failing to get any mail out, and is doing so without giving any failure notifications.

Is there a way I can test for the presence of an available database on the main server, and if not, fall back on one of the replication servers?

Answer 1

The NotesDatabase object has a property "IsOpen" - boolean - which can be used to check if a database was successfully opened, after a call to notesSession.getDatabase. So, you could do something like the following:

Set objNotesMailFile = objNotesSession.GETDATABASE("XXX-BASE-MAIL-04/CompanyName", dbString)
if not (objNotesMailFile.IsOpen) then
  ' try next server
  ...
end if

EDIT: Just for completeness... There is also an optional third argument you can pass to the GetDatabase method - a boolean - which specifies whether to return a valid object when the database (or server) cannot be opened, or to return a value of NOTHING. Specifying the 3rd argument as FALSE will return NOTHING, which you can check for. Same result, in the end.