We were using a notesTimer to automate a view refresh in the background to ensure the view was always up to date. Gradually we started getting ‘in order perform multiple tasks you must use a different DB handle’ messages.Over time this escalated into more & more of these messages & then the red screen of death, hence this post.
It took a while but we were able to pinpoint the use of the notesTimer in a documents PostOpen whilst simultaneously paing up and down in another view (could be the same db or a different one) as the cause of the messages. Removed the notesTimer & hey presto we’ve had a whole week without the message.
So - beware of notesTimer to control view refresh.
Incidentally this is not the only cause of the message but we haven’t bottomed the others out yet.
(It is reported to IBM).
Clients used 7.02 & 7.03. Server 7.02 FP2, then we upgraded to FP3 and had same problem.
Subject: RE: notesTimer & view refresh issues
Did you try disabling the timer only while you’re in the timer event handler, so that your timer events don’t overrun each other? Is it possible you could trap the error with On Error and just skip that iteration?
Subject: notesTimer & view refresh issues
I used to use NotesTimer for that purpose, and ran into similar problems. Then I realized that the function is already available to us in all views: on the second (information) tab of the view design infotab, check the options for ‘On Refresh’. The default is ‘Display indicator’ - try one of the other options. I use ‘Refresh from top row’ in the case that a view is sorted descending by date.
I don’t know of any way to control the frequency of the refresh, and it may not be as frequent as you like (it looks like something close to 60 minutes to me). But if that interval works for you, the method works great!
Subject: notesTimer & view refresh issues - additional info
Three years later, I ran into a situation that taught me a little more about this issue. Even though I had set the ‘On Refresh’ option to ‘refresh from top row’ in the view design, the updates from the server were not appearing in UI view in the client without a manual refresh (F9).
After careful reading (and re-reading) the help file, I realized the answer. I was updating the database with a server agent that simply created a new document. But the backend view was not getting refreshed after the document was saved. If you look closely, the documentation says:
'By default, refresh is automatic when view navigation touches an update"
Since I was only saving a new document, I never did any view navigation and a backend view refresh was never triggered. I added a forced view refresh at the end of my agent (notesview.refresh). After that my clients started picking up the view update within 1-2 minutes of the agent running.