Open Lotus Notes database by Replica ID in C#

Question

I created a program a while ago using C# that does some automation for a completely different program, but found that I need to access data from a Lotus Notes database. The only problem is, I can only seem to figure out how to open the database by the server's name (using session.GetDatabase())... I can't figure out how to open it by Replica ID. Does anyone know how I would go about that? (I don't want my program going down every time the server changes.)

public static string[] GetLotusNotesHelpTickets()
{
    NotesSession session = new NotesSession();
    session.Initialize(Password);
    // 85256B45:000EE057 = NTNOTES1A Server Replica ID
    NotesDatabase database = session.GetDatabase("NTNOTES1A", "is/gs/gshd.nsf", false);
    string SearchFormula = string.Concat("Form = \"Call Ticket\""
                                    , " & GroupAssignedTo = \"Business Systems\""
                                    , " & CallStatus = \"Open\"");
    NotesDocumentCollection collection = database.Search(SearchFormula, null, 0);
    NotesDocument document = collection.GetFirstDocument();
    string[] ticketList = new string[collection.Count];

    for (int i = 0; i < collection.Count; ++i)
    {
        ticketList[i] = ((object[])(document.GetItemValue("TicketNumber")))[0].ToString();
        document = collection.GetNextDocument(document);
    }

    document = null;
    collection = null;
    database = null;
    session = null;

    return ticketList;
}

This code is working fine, but if the server changed from NTNOTES1A, then nothing is going to work anymore.

Answer 1

Hi, you'll need to use the notesDbDirectory.OpenDatabaseByReplicaID(rid$) method. To get the NotesDbDirectory, you can use the getDbDirectory method of the session

Set notesDbDirectory = notesSession.GetDbDirectory( serverName$ )

So you can use the code below to get a database by replicaID.

public static string[] GetLotusNotesHelpTickets()
{
    NotesSession session = new NotesSession();
    session.Initialize(Password);

    Set notesDBDirectory = session.GetDbDirectory("NTNOTES1A")
    // 85256B45:000EE057 = NTNOTES1A Server Replica ID
    NotesDatabase database = notesDBDirectory.OpenDatabaseByReplicaID("85256B45:000EE057")
    string SearchFormula = string.Concat("Form = \"Call Ticket\""
                                    , " & GroupAssignedTo = \"Business Systems\""
                                    , " & CallStatus = \"Open\"");
    NotesDocumentCollection collection = database.Search(SearchFormula, null, 0);
    NotesDocument document = collection.GetFirstDocument();
    string[] ticketList = new string[collection.Count];

    for (int i = 0; i < collection.Count; ++i)
    {
        ticketList[i] = ((object[])(document.GetItemValue("TicketNumber")))[0].ToString();
        document = collection.GetNextDocument(document);
    }

    document = null;
    collection = null;
    database = null;
    session = null;

    return ticketList;
}

Unfortunately, this only solves half of your problem. I know you'd rather just tell Notes to fetch the database with a particular replicaID from the server closest to the client, just like the Notes Client does when you click on a DBLink or Bookmark. However, there is (or appears to be) no way to do that using the Notes APIs.

My suggestion is to either loop through a hard-coded list of potential servers by name, and check to see if the database is found (the OpenDatabaseByReplicaID method returns ERR_SYS_FILE_NOT_FOUND (error 0FA3) if the database is not found). If that's not a good option, perhaps you can easily expose the servername in an admin menu of your app so it can be changed easily if the server name changes at some point.

Answer 2

set database = new NotesDatabase("") call database.OpenByReplicaID("repid")

Answer 3

can anybody tel me how to update values... this works great btw...