Notes from Support: Domino Replication (Preventing and Resolving Replication Conflicts sidebar)

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Preventing and resolving replication conflicts (sidebar)

Despite the sophisticated logic Domino uses to avoid replication conflicts, you can do the following things to help further prevent conflicts:

• Exploit the power of the Access Control List (ACL). Assign users Author access or lower, instead of Editor access. Limiting the number of Editors in a database reduces the possibility of someone accidentally editing another user's document.
• During form design, select the Merge replication conflicts option in the Properties InfoBox. This option allows the Replicator to automatically merge conflict documents if no fields conflict.
• Specify a versioning option when you create a form. Then, edited documents automatically become new documents.
• If you're LotusScript savvy, you can create a program that uses $ConflictActionItem to merge documents automatically if no fields conflict.
• You can also create a custom conflict handler using LotusScript. This handler allows you to handle the conflict, or let the conflict be handled automatically.

For information on designing forms, see the Application Developer's Guide. For information on using LotusScript, see the Lotus Notes Designer for Domino 4.6 Programmer's Guide Part 1, the LotusScript Language Reference, and the LotusScript Programmer's Guide.

Resolving conflicts

Despite your best efforts at preventing replication conflicts, they're bound to happen. When you're faced with such a situation, you can do one of the following:

Option 1. Delete the "loser" but save its information

1. See if the loser contains any information that should be added to the winner document. If so, copy the information and paste it into the winner document.
2. Delete the loser (the response document with a "diamond" next to it).

Option 2. Delete the "winner" and save the "loser"

1. Open the loser, switch to edit mode, and then save the document. This removes the document's [Replication or Save Conflict] status (removes the black diamond) and promotes it to a main document.
2. If the original winner had any response documents, select them and choose Edit - Cut.
3. Highlight the new winner (the document you chose in Step 1) and choose Edit - Paste. This makes the responses you cut in Step 2 into response documents of the new winner.
4. Delete the old winning document.