CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javalotus-notes
Dinesh Kumar
Dinesh Kumar

Reputation: 1499

Find and delete duplicates in a Lotus Notes database

I am very new to lotus notes. Recently my team mates were facing a problem regarding the Duplicates in Lotus notes as shown below in the CASE A and CASE B.

enter image description here

So we bought a app named scanEZ (Link About scanEX). Using this tool we can remove the first occurrence or the second occurrence. As in the case A and Case B the second items are considered as redundant because they do not have child. So we can remove all the second item as given below and thus removing the duplicates. enter image description here But in the Case 3 the order gets changed, the child item comes first and the Parent items comes second so i am unable to use the scanEX app.

Is there any other better way or software or script to accomplish my task. As I am new to this field I have not idea. Kindly help me.

Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2164

Answers (3)

James Fricker
James Fricker

Reputation: 72

These are clearly not duplicates.

The definition of duplicate is that they are identical and so it does not matter which one is kept and which one is removed. To you, the fact that one has children makes it more important, which means that they are not pure duplicates.

What you have not stated is what you want to do if multiple documents with similar dates/subjects have children (a case D if you will).

To me this appears as three separate problems.

  • The first problem is to sort out the cases where more than one document in a set has children.
  • Then sort out the cases where only one document in a set has children.
  • Then sort out the cases where none of the documents in a set has children.

The approach in each case will be different. The article from Ytira only really covers the last of these cases.

Upvotes: 1

user2715935
user2715935

Reputation: 46

I agree with Richard's answer. If you want more details on how to go thru the document collection you could isolate the documents into a view that shows only the duplicates. Then write an agent to look at the UNID of the document, date modified and other such data elements to insure that you are getting the last updated document. I would add a field to the document as in FLAG='keep'. Then delete documents that don't have your flag in the document with a second agent. If you take this approach you can often use the same agents in other databases.

Since you are new to Notes keep in mind that Notes is a document database. There are several different conflicts like save conflicts or replication conflicts. Also you need to look at database settings on how duplicates can be handled. I would read up on these topics just so you can explain it to your co-workers/project manager.

Eventually in your heavily travelled databases you might be able to automate this process after you work down the source of the duplicates.

Upvotes: 1

Richard Schwartz
Richard Schwartz

Reputation: 14628

Probably the easiest way to approach this would be to force the view to always display documents with children first. That way the tool you have purchased will behave consistently for you. You would do this by adding a hidden sorted column to the right of the column that that you have circled. The formula in this column would be @DocChildren, and the sort options for the column would be set to 'Descending'. (Note that if you are uncomfortable making changes in this view, you can make a copy of it, make your changes in the copy, and run ScanEZ against the copy as well. You can also do all of this in a local replica of the database, and only replicate it back to the server when you are satisified that you have the right results.)

The other way would be to write your own code in LotusScript or Java, using the Notes classes. There are many different ways that you could write that code,

Upvotes: 4

Related Questions