XFOR: Chat Server Fails to Correctly Interpret an Extension

• Microsoft Exchange Server, version 5.5
• Microsoft Commercial Internet System version 2.0

SUMMARY

According to the Chat Server Specification for Server Extension, if a Server Extension fails during the initialization process, it should return a non-zero result. This result indicates that the extension initialization has failed and the Chat server should ignore the remaining instructions of the extension.

However, the Chat server is not ignoring the remaining instructions of the extension. The Chat server continues to process the extension and eventually fails when the initialization process is not in place, that is, a log file is create for channel transcription.

MORE INFORMATION

There is no detrimental problems resulting from the fact that the Chat server is not ignoring the remaining instructions of the extension; this however, spends resources in the server extension process that will not complete.

Be sure to fully test your server extension before implementing it into a production environment.

WORKAROUND

The extension writer could possibly maintain a global variable that would be set to what is returned from Init. Then, in each callback function, the code could be wrapped with an if statement taking the Init return value into account.

For example, assume that "gInitReturnValue" is the global variable. In the Init function, set gInitReturnValue equal to the value returned from the Init function. Then do this in each callback function:

NOTE: This example is provided as sample code.. it is not written in any language in particular.

Function OnNewUser(...)
    If 0 = gInitReturnValue Then
        Do the OnNewUser code in here
    Else
        Init must have failed, so don't do this code and just return zero
to tell the server that everything worked fine in this function
    End If
End Function 

Additional query words: mcischat;xfor

Keywords :
Version : winnt:2.0,5.5
Platform : winnt
Issue type : kbbug