LDD Today

Ask Professor INI
Calendar variables
Looking in Professor INI's mailbag, it's obvious that many people want to use their NOTES.INI file to gain control over their Calendar settings. What's not so obvious is where to find those settings. Let's take a look.

Q: When I try to print my Notes Calendar using one of the Print styles in the Content box of the Print dialog box, the Calendar prints with another style. Can I use my NOTES.INI to fix this?
This might happen to anyone who has customized one or more print styles by clicking the Customize button in the Print dialog box, and then later upgraded to Notes 5.0.3 or above from an earlier Notes client version.

When you make a Calendar customization, it takes effect in your NOTES.INI file. For example, if you change the default font from small to medium for the Monthly Style, a CALENDARSTYLE variable containing Monthly Style is created in your NOTES.INI file. For example, in 5.0.3 or later, the entry looks like this:

CALENDARSTYLE1=Monthly Style,3,0,1,1,0,1,2,07:00:00 AM,07:00:00 PM,0,0,0,1,3

If you upgrade after you have made the style customization, you may have a problem when you try to print or preview. For example, you can select Monthly Style, but the Calendar will print in the Work Week Style. Notes uses the incorrect Calendar style when both printing and previewing. This happens because the Work Week Style was added in 5.0.3, changing the numbers associate with each style. Prior to 5.0.3, if you customized the Monthly Style, an entry would have been written in your NOTES.INI file that looks like this:

CALENDARSTYLE1=Monthly Style,2,0,1,1,0,1,2,07:00:00 AM,07:00:00 PM,0,0,0,1,3

Notice that before 5.0.3, the number after Monthly Style is 2, whereas in the 5.0.3 and later version, it's 3. The addition of the new Work Week Style in 5.0.3 shifted the associated numbers.

Simply changing the customization back to the default settings in the Print dialog box won't resolve the problem because the CALENDARSTYLE line will remain in the NOTES.INI file with the incorrect style number. To fix the problem while retaining your print customizations, you can edit your NOTES.INI file so that the style number is correct. So, in our example, you would change the number after Monthly Style to 3 in the CALENDARSTYLE parameter. You can also just delete the CALENDARSTYLE variable from the NOTES.INI file altogether, but this will remove any print customizations you have specified.

Here is a list of the numbers associated with the different Calendar styles in 5.0.3 and later:

Daily Style
0
Weekly Style
1
Work Week Style
2
Monthly Style
3
Calendar List
4
To Do List
5
Trifold Style
6

If this problem affects a large number of users in an organization, you might resolve it by sending users a button that uses an @Environment command to manually change the setting.

Q: What's the significance of the number at the end of the CALENDARSTYLE variable?
The number at the end of CALENDARSTYLE (CALENDARSTYLE1, for example) is not significant. It indicates only the order in which each of the styles was customized.

Q. I'm experiencing issues with the Schedule Manager on my Domino server. It seems to store large amounts of Busy Time and Free Time Calendar information. Is there any way I can control this? Also, once in a while our Free Time information becomes inaccurate. Are there any NOTES.INI variables I can set to fix this?
Your first question is fairly simple to deal with. By default, Schedule Manager retains seven days' worth of Free Time/Busy Time data. You can change this through the variable Sched_Purge_Interval=days, where days defines how long to keep past Calendar information. For example, to tell Schedule Manager to purge this information after three days, set Sched_Purge_Interval=3.

Your second question is a little more complex. On rare occasions, Schedule Manager running on an extremely busy server may not keep the Free Time database synchronized with Calendar entries in the mail file, or reservations in the Resource Reservations database.There is a NOTES.INI variable you can use to help address this problem. However, using this variable might result in slower server performance, as we'll discuss below. So be sure you've explored all other possible fixes. For example:
If after trying the above you're still experiencing discrepancies with scheduling information, you can add the variable Schedule_Check_Entries_When_Validating=1 to your server's NOTES.INI file. This forces Schedule Manager to re-validate all Busy Time entries on a user-by-user basis. However, it's important to note that re-validating each entry consumes computing power. So we recommend using Schedule_Check_Entries_When_Validating only when other actions for eliminating scheduling errors have failed. (By default, this variable is not included in NOTES.INI, since in the vast majority of cases it's not needed.)

Q. Can I have the Calendar find free time for meeting invitees, even if their Person documents are in a cascaded Domino Directory?
Yes indeed, and since this is after all Professor INI's column, it probably won't surprise you to learn that in at least some cases, you can do this through the NOTES.INI file. For example, suppose you've set up cascaded directories as follows:
If a chairperson does a free time search on an invitee whose Person document resides in names2.nsf, the free time will be grayed out. This happens because Schedule Manager, by default, looks for the invitee's Person document only in names.nsf. However, you can add the variable INET_Authenticate_With_Secondary=1 to the NOTES.INI file on your Directory Assistance server. This tells Schedule Manager to perform exhaustive lookups when validating users.

Q. I run Domino on iSeries. Everything seems fine, except our users can't seem to reserve conference rooms and resources—their invitations are always declined. We've checked, and we know the rooms are available. How can I fix this?
This problem might be due to the way your operating system handles U.S. date formats. To fix this, try adding the DateOrder variable to your server's NOTES.INI file. This sets the date format used by Domino. For example, to have the date format be day/month/year, set DateOrder=DMY. If this doesn't fix the issue, contact Lotus Support. (For more information on DateOrder and other time-related NOTES.INI variables, see the January 2001 installment of Ask Professor INI.)


Do you have a NOTES.INI questions? Send it in to Professor INI. We'll answer as many questions as we can in future "Ask Professor INI" columns. Keep in mind, however, that we may not be able to answer every question, nor can we quickly respond to requests that require immediate attention. If you need an immediate response to a question, we recommend you post it in the Notes/Domino Gold Release Forum where someone from the general Notes community might be able to help, or contact Lotus Support Services.