Replication document are the third type of design documents supported by Domino Connection. Domino uses replication documents to store information about how and what elements of a particular database should be replicated with other Domino servers or Notes workstations. VA Smalltalk Domino Connection grants you access to information in replication documents and lets you specify replication settings from your Smalltalk application.

As operations on replication setting are relatively complicated from an API perspective, Domino Connection condenses the functions into a convenient to use class called AbtLnReplicationSettings. An instance of this class can be retrieved from AbtLnDatabase using the replicationSettings method.

Basic settings can be accessed through an AbtLnReplicationSettings instance with simple methods like isHighPriority or excludeDeletedNotes. If you change replication settings, be aware that you have to execute the store method to make the changes persistent.

Replication documents are projected onto a class named AbtLnSelectiveReplicationSettings. This class offers the necessary protocol to read and write settings for each replication peer. Thorough understanding of selective replication and the underlying mechanism is required to operate AbtLnSelectiveReplicationSettings instances.

Limited by the capabilities of the API, VA Smalltalk Domino Connection can only initiate replication for a local database with a server database. It is simple to start replication for a database by sending the message replicateWithServer: to the AbtLnDatabase instance. Using this protocol, default replication options are used. If you need to specify special options, use replicateWithServer:options: and an AbtLnReplicationSettings object. With AbtLnReplicationSettings you can fine-tune the replication as you would do it using the "replicate with options" feature of the client software.