CodeStore.net comments on "Ten Years On And Still Learning -- Notes Agent Data Stores"

Reply from Tommy Valand

Tommy Valand — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 06:06:39 -0500

I think he's referring to the "get design doc by NotesNoteCollection"-method.

The SavedData-document gets deleted/recreated when you modify the agent. The design document is the same until you delete the agent.

Example:

http://www.lotusgeek.com/LotusGeek/LotusGeekBlog.nsf/d6plinks/ROLR-5NU4QB

Reply from Jake Howlett

Jake Howlett — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:11:45 -0500

"store data in the agent design document"

Isn't that what I'm doing Peter? If not, please expand on how.

Reply from Peter Presnell

Peter Presnell — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:44:49 -0500

Another option is to store data in the agent design document itself. This has the advantage of being accessible from outside the agent and the values can then be included in a view. I am using this as a way of showing the date/time each agent last ran to those who do not have Designer level access to the database.

Reply from MacDork

MacDork — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:13:52 -0500

Ahh. Delightful. I was hoping I hadn't been missing something all these years!

Keep up the great work, btw. I lurk on your blog and read it regularly through rss. Thanks for the hard work you put into it.

Reply from Jake Howlett

Jake Howlett — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:20:48 -0500

Nothing wrong with that approach MacDork. Seems a better one to me. Just not what came to mind when I first implemented this. Always more than one way to skin a ....

Reply from MacDork

MacDork — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 07:20:42 -0500

What's wrong w/ creating a custom field on the document for it's status?

-- The absence of the field could indicate that it's a new document.

-- Setting the field's value to 1 could mean some initial state, like "processed".

If you then create a view of documents who's "status" field was absent and you then have a handy list of documents on which to run your agent, without the overhead of creating/maintaining a document collection. When your agent is done processing each document, the last step would be to set the "status" field's value to "1".

With this approach, it doesn't matter what time the agent last ran, or completed, or even what documents were created while it ran.

Even if you had 1m documents, that would only be 1MB of data used by the extra field.

Am I oversimplifying things and missing the point, entirely?

Reply from Tommy Valand

Tommy Valand — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 06:01:39 -0500

I had a little experiment with SavedData in the early days of my blog. This was in regard to caching on the web.

If anyone reading is considering the same, there are some things you need to consider.

http://dontpanic82.blogspot.com/2007/10/notessessionsaveddata-great-for-wqo.html

All I seem to add to you blog lately Jake, are shameful plugs. Sorry about that..

I'm in the situation you described earlier. I need to find areas that are interesting to both my readers -and- me. There's new ground to be conquered (XPages), but unless I start working with XPages applications at my job, I'm not going to learn enough to feel it's worth sharing. Here's hoping :)

Reply from Bill Buchan

Bill Buchan — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:31:33 -0500

And even better, if you switch agent profiling on, its saved as a profile document which you can then pick up programmatically. Its in one of my presentations somewhere, easy enough to reverse engineer.

Handy for harvesting run-times, etc.

---* Bill

Reply from Morten Clausen

Morten Clausen — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 05:20:14 -0500

Be careful about fiddling with the agent data notes. They can go orphan at the drop of a hat (http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=0&uid=swg24004199) and cause all kinds of interesting problems. I would use a profile document instead.

Reply from Ed Lee

Ed Lee — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 04:39:57 -0500

Great post Jake and great tip Rob.

Something I never knew about and will be very handy.