Use Nothing for cutoff date in NotesDatabase.Search

Many Notes developers have learned to use a date far in the past to limit search results, when they really want Search to return all results regardless of date. Example:

Dim dateTime As New NotesDateTime("12/01/94")
Set collection = db.Search(searchFormula$, dateTime, 0)

This is wrong for two reasons.

First, it's inefficient to do the unnecessary test of last modified date.

Second, the way the date is specified makes this code incompatible with systems that represent dates differently, e.g. Japanese computers use yyyy/mm/dd, so the string "12/01/94" is not a valid date.

If you want all search results regardless of date, use Nothing as the date argument, e.g.:


Set collection = db.Search(searchFormula$, Nothing, 0)

This was first published in August 2002

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