We write a lot of critical logic into agents that are scheduled to run during the night. Sometimes agents don't run. Perhaps the administators turned down the server, changed access rights or someting else happened that stopped the agent for a night or more.
I created an application that stored contracts. To every contract the users can add dates when different parts of the contract ends and they need to preform some kind of action not to be forced into an expensive extension of the contract or miss out on some other benefits.
So a scheduled agent takes care of all the logic. Sending out e-mails to the responsible parties of every contract in good time before the last date of action is reached. But what if the agent doesn't run? Then the key function of my appliction doesn't deliver. So I did the following: In the database post open event (well hidden as other - database resources - database script) I check to see if the agent that should have been running this night really did run. Every time a user opens the database, the application checks to see if it is working as expected. No magic in the code but it makes the application more stable.
Sub Postopen(Source As Notesuidatabase)
Dim session As New NotesSession
Dim db As NotesDatabase
Dim agent As NotesAgent
Dim vLastRun As Variant
Dim docConfig As NotesDocument
Dim docMail As NotesDocument
Dim body As NotesRichTextItem
Dim strSenastKord As String
On Error Goto errorhandler
Set db = session.CurrentDatabase
Print "Opening " + db.Title
If db.Server <> "" Then
Set agent = db.getAgent ("agBevakning")
Dim datLastRun
As New NotesDateTime(agent.LastRun)
If Today = datLastRun.DateOnly Then
Print "Agent ran ok"
Else
Messagebox "Message to the user
that explains what has not happend
and to take the right actions to correct the problem,
i.e. call support and manually
check the view that lists all up comming events"
End If
Else
Print "Database is local, can't
check if the agent has run on the server"
End If
Exit Sub
errorhandler:
Print "Can't check to see if the agent has run."
Resume Next
End Sub
This code works great, and I've used it as an easy way to have a single code set that can be scheduled to run in different environments with minimal fuss. Before you get too confident in this, though, check on what happens when your called agent exceeds the runtime limits for the server.
—B. Hawthorne
******************************************
Yes, you are right. If the agent exceeds the runtime limit, some work might not be done, but the script reports nothing. In my case, this is unlikely since the agent really hasn't that much to do and we allow quite a long agent runtime during the night. An enhancement is to read the agent log and log success or failure to the log, as well as check for that in the script above.
—Erik Rydberg, tip author
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This was first published in October 2005