HCL Notes and Domino wiki: Notes calendar: Using NotesPeek

Using NotesPeek

Added by ~Ned Asaretexoden | Edited by ~Ned Asaretexoden on March 22, 2012 | Version 4

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Abstract

Abstract

A brief introduction to the NotesPeek tool and how to use it for troubleshooting.

Using NotesPeek to view and export information from IBM Lotus Notes Databases

Susan Bulloch, IBM Software Support

This article will take you step by step through using Notespeek, a free utility from IBM Support than can help you in troubleshooting issues, or help prepare data for sending to IBM for analysis. For purposes of demonstration, we'll look at exporting the data in a user's calendar profile to a text file.

What is NotesPeek? Its a tool that allows us and you to see hidden elements of a file or document. You can export the data for analysis

Technote https://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24005686 contains a link to the tools, and while it appears to be an older tool, it still works with current databases.

Installing Notespeek

After downloading, extract notespeek.exe to your client's program directory on your workstation. NotesPeek is designed to use the Notes .dll files, so it must be in the same directory. It can run on your server, but 32-bit Domino servers are becoming less common. We can do what we need from the administrator's workstation.

Add an icon to your desktop using the Send To function in your operating system for easy access if you like.

Using NotesPeek

Next, launch NotesPeek and choose a file. In this case, the file is on a server, so we need to select the server first.

And you'll be prompted for your password.

Navigate to the folder containing the file you want - in this case its the mail folder. We want to look at user Cat Furr (fictional of course). Expand the twisties to find the profile documents and for our purposes here, we pick the calendarprofile as shown.

Calendar Profiles store user settings and a lot of 'control' information for under the hood processing. Sometimes this information doesn't match what the GUI or policy setting reflect, so examining the contents is a good troubleshooting step. Since the profile documents are hidden, we get to look here for differences.

At this point, we can expand the document and examine the contents, but it is more readable as a text document, so let's dump the contents out and open it with a text editor. This also lets you send the contents of the profile document to IBM Support if you need to.

Simply select calendarprofile, go to Data -> Dump to File

The utility is a little manual, so you have to type the path, give your file a name (including the .txt extension) and be sure to choose to "Include collapsed data." As you see, you can also export as XML if you want.

At this point, you can navigate to where you save the file and examine it using a text editor, There are a lot of fields. You can find most fields defined in the Calendar Schema here:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/dx/cs_schema_toc . Some of the profile items may not show in the schema.

For instance, the calendar profile we saved shows that Alarms are disabled for our user, and she may have thought they were enabled - the value of $AlarmEnabled="" according to our output. If alarms were enabled, the value would be "1".

An example of when you could use this technique is for an issue where a field contains wrong information such as after a user is renamed, or when the name is wrong in the busytime system.

In our case, our user is defined correctly here, but if the name change wasn't properly processed or wasn't given time to finish, it might show as the old name.