In extremely rare cases, your request might complete with a return and reason code indicating that XCF itself failed. XCF will have already arranged for the gathering of appropriate diagnostic data. In general, it is reasonable to proceed as if the request completed with status unknown. If the problem occurs repeatedly or your program is otherwise unable to make progress, it might be appropriate for your program to gather diagnostic data to document the impact of the failure from the perspective of your application. Additional recovery actions such as deleting the connection or deleting the note pad might be warranted.

In the particular case of a create connection request, XCF will have arranged (as needed) for the connection to be cancelled. The cancellation of the failed create request is processed asynchronously and might not be accomplished immediately. Your program can simply reissue the create connection request, though the number of attempts should be limited to avoid the possibility of repeated failures. In general, the new request is likely to create the new connection successfully. However there might be some exceptions if XCF is still in the midst of cancelling the failed create request.

• Suppose the creator of the note pad specified MULTIWRITE=NO so that there could be at most one connection with update access to the note pad. Suppose that you are trying to create a connection with update access. It could be the case that the failed create request will appear to be the one and only one connection permitted to have update access to the note pad. If so, your reissued create connection request might be rejected until XCF is able to finish cancelling the failed request.
• The number of connections to any given note pad from any given address space is limited. It could be the case that the failed create request will appear to consume one of those slots. If so and all the slots are used, your reissued create connection request might be rejected until XCF is able to finish cancelling the failed request.

If the failure occurs when deleting a note pad, it might be necessary for the installation to use the XCF Delete Note Pad Utility (IXCDELNP) to manually delete the note pad.