There's been a thorn in my side recently in that Domino has been leaving temporary files on the server and causing my code to break. The code emailed out PDF invoices, which are supposed to have my customer's logo on, but, because the code break, they didn't. It's all a bit embarrassing really for both parties involved.

The PDF file is generated by a Java Agent. To embed their logo in it it looks for a "setting" document which has the image file attached to it. It then get an InputStream so it can read the file in to "memory", like so:

You can see the same approach in use here (note the image in the resulting PDF -- it's from a document in the DB).

Now, at the point we call getInputStream() Domino creates a temporary file in the server's temp folder. It's name is something like eo12345678tm. This is where the problems start, as the names of these files don't appear to be random enough to ensure there isn't a conflict of names in those that don't get cleared up.

The problem is that, if Domino tries to create a temp file and one of the name it's trying to create already exists it just fails. Worse still it seems to remember this file's name ready for the next time you try to call getInputStream(). Again it will fail. It will keep failing until you go in there and clear out the temp files.

Having cleared out the folder once only for it to happen again I went looking for the solution. Luckily Julian had documented the issue. The solution is simple -- add a call to the recycle() method of the EmbeddedObject. Doh!! Turns out it was my fault all along.

So I added the fix to my code and breathed a sigh of relief. Things seemed to be working again. One less thing to worry about.

Not so quick! It soon happened again. What I'd neglected to do was clear up the existing temp files from the server after adding the fix. It was only a matter of time before server tried to write a temp file with the name of one those left behind and got itself stuck in a rut again.

To solve this I wrote a quick agent to remove all the temp files (I don't have shell access). Here it is:

Sub RemoveTempFiles
    Dim pathName As String, fileName As String, tmpFolder As String
    tmpFolder = "C:\Windows\Temp\"
    pathName = tmpFolder + "eo*tm" 'E.g: eo1989832343tm
    fileName = Dir(pathName, 0)
    On Error Goto failed
    Do While fileName <> ""
        Kill tmpFolder + fileName
nextFile:        
        fileName = Dir()
    Loop 
    Exit Sub
failed:
    Call LogEvent("Can't delete temp file - " + fileName, 2, Nothing)
    Resume nextFile
End Sub

Hopefully this will help somebody out at some point.