Just when you think you know everything you need to know about Domino, you learn something new. This week I found out that WebQueryOpen/Save agents have their own timeout settings in the server document.

If you're unlucky enough you might have come across this error:

HTTP Web Server: Lotus Notes Exception - Agent did not complete within the time limit

It might take some fairly poor coding, but it can be done. The code I was dealing with when I saw this was inherited, honest. Although, in this case, it wasn't the code to blame but the way Notes was being forced to act like a relational system.

Either way, if there's absolutely no other way round it, you might need to up the timeout for WQS agents. You do this in the Domino Web Engine tab, which is in the Internet Protocols tab of the server document. In this tab there's a table down at the bottom left corner with a setting called "Web agent timeout":

The fact that this setting is in seconds and not minutes tells you it really ought to be kept as low as possible. After all, for as long as the code is running that's how long the user is left waiting.

The default value is 0, which means the agents can run indefinitely. Probably not a good idea. Also be default, the server only runs one agent at a time. Good idea or not? I don't know.

From the help db:

When the server shuts down an offending agent, resources that the agent was using (such as disk files) may be left open.

It's a bit of a minefield out there. If you find yourself upping the timeout limit above, say, 30s it might well be time for a re-think...

Note: All this applies to agents run from the URL ?OpenAgent command as well.