A quick way to find (and rid yourself of) duplicate Lotus Notes documents using scanEZ

A good number of the support questions we receive could be boiled down and paraphrased as: “Can Ytria software help me find and delete duplicates in a Notes database?”

The answer is ‘yes, the software can help.’

It’s always been quite straightforward to do this with the scanEZ tool. It’s been especially quick and easy since the introduction of the ‘Select All With Identical Displayed Titles (but skip first match)’ option in scanEZ’s version 8.0 release.

Here’s how you do it:

To begin you need a selection of documents to work with (in our example we’ll work with all emails using the “memo” form) and then you’ll need to change the displayed titles for all these documents to show a sort of a ‘unique key.’ After this, documents with identical displayed titles (i.e. identical ‘unique key’ field values) can be safely assumed to be duplicates.

For an email database we’ll be looking at in this post, a combination of the PostedDate and Subject items provides an adequately unique key for determining duplicates.

From here we can use the Change Displayed Title button in the menu bar.

In the resulting dialog, we’ll select the ‘Formula‘ radio button; click ‘Edit’; and then enter the following formula to generate our custom Selection Tree titles:

@Text(PostedDate)+“;”+Subject

Note 1: We used the @Text command because PostedDate is a date-type item and we needed it displayed as text.

Note 2: Oftentimes a single field value will provide an adequately unique value for determining duplicates. To use a single field for document titles, just select the desired field in the Item List panel and click the ‘Use Field as Title’ button in the menu bar.
After evaluating the displayed title formula, the Selection Tree titles should show our unique key.

Actually selecting the duplicates comes next. To do this, simply right-click the category of documents (in our case we’re right-clicking ‘Memos’) and choose ‘Select All with Identical Displayed Title‘ in the contextual menu.

We’re going to want to tick the ‘Skip First Match’ box in the Select All with Identical Displayed Titled dialog. This allows us to select all our duplicates documents, but keep one copy.

Once the duplicate documents are selected, just right-click again and choose ‘Checkbox Selection>Add to..>New MySelection.’

At this point it’s a good idea to inspect the documents in this new My Selection virtual folder to verify that only the duplicates are there.

Finally, just right-click the My Selection folder itself and choose ‘Delete ALL documents in Category‘ in the contextual menu. That’s it.