As I'm not seeing a good general overview of document sequential numbering for the Notes/Domino developer, I guess I'll have to write it myself. People have posted some interesting ideas in response to the last thread. Morten Clausen's caught my eye. He suggests to use a RunOnServer agent containing a CodeLock section that assigns the number. As he points out, this has the common failing of any system that provides true consecutive numbering, viz: there's a single point of failure -- and in addition, is rather a resource hog (the resource in question being agent threads on the "number server").
We could do something similar without the overhead of running an agent on the server, by taking advantage of a semaphore the server code already has in place. Specifically, it can detect whether a document you're saving has been saved by someone else since you loaded it into memory. So you might use a function such as this:
' db contains a doc where the "last used" number is stored.
' strUNID is the Universal ID of the document.
' strItemName is name of item in that doc containing last used #.
Const MAXTRIES = 5 ' if we get this many save conflicts something's wrong.
Dim docCtr As NotesDocument
Dim tries%
Dim valCtr
tryAgain:
Set docCtr = db.GetDocumentByUNID(strUNID)
valCtr = docCtr.GetItemValue(strItemName)
If Not Isnumeric(valctr(0)) Then ' first document is number 1
GetNextNumber = 1
Else
GetNextNumber = 1& + Clng(valctr(0))
End If
docCtr.ReplaceItemValue strItemName, GetNextNumber
If docCtr.Save(False, False, True) Then
' save worked!
Exit Function
Elseif tries < MAXTRIES Then
' save conflict -- try again
tries = tries + 1
Delete docCtr ' clear it out of the cache.
Goto tryAgain
Else
Error 19891, "Retry count exceeded in GetNextNumber"
End If
End Function
So you can have a single, non-replicated "number assignment" NSF used by various other applications when they need to get a unique number assigned. You can configure its operation within those various applications, with a profile document or however. For instance:
' get a local profile doc that configures the numbering mechanism
' strProfileName is the name of the profile doc.
Dim docPro As NotesDocument
Dim dbForNumbering As NotesDatabase
Set docPro = dbThis.GetProfileDocument(strProfile)
Dim strServer$ ' name of number server
Dim strFilepath$ ' filepath of NSF containing numbering document.
Dim strUNID$ ' UNID of document where counter is stored.
strServer = docPro.GetItemValue("NumberingServer")(0)
strFilepath = docPro.GetItemValue("NumberingFilepath")(0)
strUNID = docPro.GetItemValue("NumberingUNID")(0)
If strUNID = "" Or strFilepath = "" Or strServer = "" Then
Error 19890, "Profile information missing in AssignSequentialNumber"
End If
Set dbForNumbering = New NotesDatabase(strServer, strFilepath)
AssignSequentialNumber = GetNextNumber(dbForNumbering, strUNID, strItemName)
End Function
Some additional error checking would probably be beneficial, but that's the basic technique. And then of course you would format the returned number according to the requirements of your application.
By the way, I'm not recommending this approach unless you've determined that consecutive numbering is a really needed. As has been noted by others, often people ask for consecutive numbers when mere uniqueness would be sufficient.
Andre Guirard | 4 March 2008 02:23:00 AM ET | Taraccino Coffee, Minneapolis, MN, USA | Comments (1)
