Issue using .ind files to compact

I came across this issue last week when upgrading a customer from Domino 9 to R11.0.1FP3. I was finishing the upgrade by performing an offline (Domino server stopped) ODS upgrade on a large number of files using compact -c -upgrade over a .ind file that contained all files that were still on an older ODS.

It’s not good practice but also not that unusual for filenames and/or folder names to have a space in them but getting them to work with a .ind file was most challenging and ultimately futile (for me anyway). So, just to give you an idea, the .ind file had hundreds of files listed (mostly mail) but there were loads of these (examples shown):

Sales Targets\Targets.nsf
Sales Targets\Sales2019.nsf
Sales Targets\Sales2020.nsf
Sales Targets\Sales2021.nsf
Sales Targets\Overall Sales.nsf

But running the compact -c -upgrade over these caused an error that the file did not exist.

So I changed the folders to be in quotes like:

“Sales Targets”\Targets.nsf
“Sales Targets”\Sales2019.nsf
“Sales Targets”\Sales2020.nsf
“Sales Targets”\Sales2021.nsf
“Sales Targets\Overall Sales.nsf”

Now this would work on a console command line compact but it was still throwing errors. I tried numerous combinations but I really couldn’t get it to work from the .ind file no matter what I tried.

In the end, I changed the .ind file to a .bat file, moved it to the Domino program folder and run from a command line. The batch file syntax was:

ncompact -c -upgrade “Sales Targets”\Targets.nsf
ncompact -c -upgrade “Sales Targets”\Sales2019.nsf
ncompact -c -upgrade “Sales Targets”\Sales2020.nsf
ncompact -c -upgrade “Sales Targets”\Sales2021.nsf
ncompact -c -upgrade “Sales Targets\Overall Sales.nsf”

And yes, it worked.

I’d love it if someone had a solution for this. If not, it might save some time when performing ODS upgrades over files with spaces in the folder/file name.

Cheers!

Steven Vaughan

Domino People Ltd

PS – on the back of writing this, we looked at DBMT and other ways to efficiently upgrade the ODS as part of an upgrade to Domino 10/11. We’ll try these out and post our findings at a later date.