Understanding documents and pseudo documents

Domino Connection introduces an additional abstract document class based on the internal architecture of Domino: the "pseudo document" (AbtLnPseudoNote). In some important calls to the Domino API, a collection of so-called summary buffers is returned. A summary buffer is a byte array with tags that represent part of a document.

From the Domino Connection perspective, a summary buffer is a proxy of a document, thus a "pseudo document." The difference between a document and a pseudo document is small: a pseudo document does not contain all fields of the document and it is read-only. The advantage of pseudo documents is that they can be accessed faster and must not be opened to access item contents. You can convert a pseudo document implicitly into a "genuine" document. During the conversion, all relevant information is read from the database making it possible to modify the document.