The other day I mentioned Lists in LotusScript. By coincidence yesterday I found myself using them again.

As part of helping a customer migrate from Domino to Exchange I've written them an agent to export all people from their NAB in to a CSV file, which will then be imported to Exchange's address book.

For reasons I'm not entirely clear on they needed an extra column adding to the CSV called "Initial". For most people this would simply be "1". If the export found a name that had already exported for another user then the "Initial" column needed to increment to 2 - even though there was a "unique ID" column in the CSV - and so on.

So the CSV would look like (ignoring lots of missing columns):

First Name, Last Name, Initial
Jake, Howlett, 1
John, Smith, 1
Karen, Howlett, 1
John, Smith, 2
Joe, Taylor, 1
John, Smith, 3
Karen, Howlett, 2

You get the idea, right?

It turned out doing this was really simple in LotusScript using Lists. Here's how:

Dim NameCount List As Integer
Dim NameFull As String

'this bit inside a loop of all Person documents (doc)
NameFull=LCase(Trim(doc.FirstName(0))+" "+Trim(doc.LastName(0)))
If IsElement(NameCount(NameFull)) Then
 NameCount(NameFull)=NameCount(NameFull)+1
Else
 NameCount(NameFull)=1
End If

Print #fileNum%, doc.FirstName(0)+{,}+doc.LastName(0)+{,}+ CStr(NameCount(NameFull))

In fact it turns out you can simplify that code even further to:

Dim NameCount List As Integer
Dim NameFull As String

'this bit inside a loop of all Person documents (doc)
NameFull=LCase(Trim(doc.FirstName(0))+" "+Trim(doc.LastName(0)))
NameCount(NameFull)=NameCount(NameFull)+1

Print #fileNum%, doc.FirstName(0)+{,}+doc.LastName(0)+{,}+ CStr(NameCount(NameFull))

There you go. LotusScript still standing the test of time...