When issuing the IXCNOTE macro to perform a read notes request, you must specify the RESUMETOKEN keyword to name a storage area from which XCF is to retrieve a resume token. Upon return from the XCF Note Pad Services, a new resume token is stored in this same storage area. The resume token in effect divides the notes in the note pad into two sets, the set of notes that have been considered for selection and the set of notes that have not been considered. For a resume token of zero, the set of notes that have been considered is defined to be empty, and the set of notes not yet considered for selection is defined to be all the notes in the note pad. A program will typically first specify a resume token of zero to have all the notes in the note pad be considered for selection. When that read request returns, XCF updates the resume token with a nonzero value to identify the set of notes in the note pad that were not considered for selection. If this nonzero resume token value is then supplied as input to a subsequent read notes request, only notes from that set will be selected. So in effect, a resume token of zero implies "start from the beginning" and a nonzero token implies "start with the next note".

When specifying a nonzero resume token, only use a value that was stored by a valid read notes request. The resume token is valid for use by the note pad connection that issued the read notes request that stored the token.

When passing a nonzero resume token, your program should in general pass the same selection criteria as was specified when the request was first initiated, and continue doing so for each iteration of the read request until it is complete. However, there is no requirement that the same selection criteria be used when the read request is reissued.

Note that the XCF Note Pad Services also return a nonzero resume token when the multi-note read request completes with return code 0. The resume token in this case divides the note pad into two sets, the set of notes that have been considered for selection (all the notes currently in the note pad) and the set of all notes not yet considered for selection (an empty set). With respect to this resume token, the set of notes not yet considered for selection will become non-empty as new notes are created in the future. If this resume token were to be specified on a subsequent multi-note read request, only the newly created notes would be considered for selection. You could for example issue a sequence of multi-note read requests such that each successor request only reports the notes that were newly created after the predecessor request completed. To achieve this behavior, the resume token returned by each completed predecessor request would be supplied as input to the successor request.