SPR

Technote

Problem:
This issue was reported to Quality Engineering as SPR# SVRO5L7VZR and has been
fixed in 6.0.4/6.5.1. Using this release or higher, the issue of orphaned
(attachments that appear as Picture objects) or hidden file attachments will no
longer occur. However, documents with previously orphaned attachments may
still exist.

In Notes releases 6.5.5 and 7.0.1 a fix was introduced (based on SPR#
MLAT6G3LBM) to automatically repair documents which contain orphaned file
attachments which were created in releases prior to 6.0.4/6.5.1. When opening
a document, if an orphaned attachment is found it is repaired and the following
message is displayed:

"Notes has detected and repaired one or more corrupted attachments. The
repaired attachment may appear as a duplicate, or a previously hidden
attachment may be displayed, so you should review the attachment(s) in this
document."


Workarounds:
In order to avoid the problem in attaching files to documents described in SPR#
SVRO5L7VZR, Notes must be upgraded to 6.0.4/6.5.1 or a later version.

If Notes cannot be upgraded, attach files from the menu [File -> Attach] rather
than with drag & drop.

Documents created by one of the affected Notes clients (6.0, 6.0.1, 6.0.2,
6.0.3 or 6.5) may still contain orphaned file attachments. To help identify
problem documents, a tool called LinkAttach is available for download from the
Notes Technical Support FTP server. This tool allows for the detection of
orphaned file attachments. To obtain the tool, refer to the technote titled
"Using the LinkAttach Tool version 1.6" (#4010418).

How to extract orphaned attachments from a document:
A LotusScript agent can be used to access a document's $File items and write
the file attachments to the operating system. The LotusScript logic cannot
differentiate between which attachments are orphans or not, and so all the
attachments are written to disk - and the list of files must be manually
checked against the Notes document content to determine which are orphaned.

Note: If an attachment name is used more than once in a Notes document then
the additional attachments are automatically, by design, given a encoded name.
If an orphaned document does have the same as another attachment it will make
it harder to identify, and it may be necessary to open the file to properly
identify it. For more information on this topic, refer to the document titled
"When Two Attachments Have the Same Name the Second is Assigned a New Name for
the Notes Back End" (#1092476).

The following LotusScript agent is one way to approach extracting file
attachments from a document. Note that, this LotusScript agent is not available
for further customization from IBM Support.

The following example requires that you create a folder called C:\Attachments.
The agent code should be set to run on "Selected Documents". When running the
agent, only a single document should be selected at a time (if the agent ran on
multiple documents there is the possibility that attachments of the same name
would be overwritten).

Sub Initialize
Dim s As New notessession
Set doc=s.DocumentContext
Forall i In doc.Items
If i.name="$FIle" and i.type = Attachment Then
Set emb = doc.GetAttachment(i.values(0))
Call emb.extractfile("C:\Attachments\" & emb.name)
End If
End Forall
End Sub

Checking for Hidden Attachments without the LinkAttach Tool:

The presence of hidden attachments can also be manually detected by comparing
the number of attachment icons displayed on the document with the number of
$File fields displayed in Document Properties. If the number of $File fields
exceeds the number of bitmaps, then there are hidden file attachments stored in
the document. One exception to this, however, is if there is embedded objects
(OLE). In which case there may be multiple $FILES here. To detect this, look
at the HOST for OLE STORAGE for these and exclude them from the overall count.

To check the number of $FILE fields:

1. Right-click on a document, and select Document Properties.
2. Click the Field tab.
3. Check the number of [$FILE] fields and see if this number matches the number
of bitmaps that a user can see on the document.

Another way to determine if the icons in a rich text field properly link to an
attached file is to launch the context sensitive Attachment Properties window.
To do so, from the menu bar select Attachment -> Attachment Properties. This is
a context sensitive menu option, so the attachment may need to be highlighted.
NOTE: If the properties window cannot be launched for a specific attachment
icon, the icon no longer links with an attached file.

If orphaned attachments are found with above methods, the following steps can
be taken to avoid an inadvertent disclosure of information.

1. Identify the document that includes the orphaned attachments.
2. Open the document, select any attachment icon and click right mouse button
to display a menu.
3. Select "Save and Delete All ..." to detach all attachments, including
orphaned ones, to a file system. Note that, the following will be added to the
rich text: [attachment "filename" deleted by UserA/Support].
4. Save the document.

The document will no longer have any attachments including orphaned ones. A
user can do anything with the document or attachments saved such as
re-attaching files on this document to send/forward a message.

The orphaned attachment may be inadvertently sent to the recipient against
sender's intent. If the user is a recipient of such an attachment, IBM
strongly recommends the user to notify the sender and obtain his/her consent
for any opening, retention, copying, dissemination or any other use of the
attachment. Please be advised that the user shall be fully responsible for
such notification and for obtaining the sender's consent. More >