NotesViewEntry × NotesViewEntryCollection: Reading Every Row of a View Fast, Without Opening Documents

You need to read “order number, amount, status” from every document in a view for a report. The instinctive approach: loop the documents in the view and doc.GetItemValue("...") each one. It works — but it opens every single document once, and across a few thousand rows it gets slow enough to make you question your life choices.

Here’s the key: those values are already computed and displayed by the view. What you want is already in the view’s index; you don’t need to open the documents again. NotesViewEntry (a row in the view) hands you that row’s column values directly through ColumnValues; NotesViewEntryCollection is the collection of those rows. This pair is the right answer for “reading a view fast.”

TL;DR

• NotesViewEntry is “a row in a view” (per the docs); NotesViewEntryCollection is the collection of those rows.
• The core advantage: entry.ColumnValues reads the view’s already-computed column values — without opening a document — an order-of-magnitude speedup over looping documents and GetItemValue.
• Get it from: view.AllEntries (all), view.GetAllEntriesByKey(key) (by sort key), view.GetEntryByKey(key) (a single one).
• Walk a collection with GetFirstEntry / GetNextEntry / GetNthEntry; it contains only document rows, not category or total rows.
• An entry’s identity / hierarchy properties: UniversalID, NoteID, IsCategory / IsDocument / IsTotal, IndentLevel, ChildCount.
• Batch operations: StampAll (set one field across the whole batch), set operations Intersect / Merge / Subtract, PutAllInFolder.

Two classes, one relationship

• NotesViewEntryCollection — the official definition: “Represents a collection of view entries, selected according to specific criteria.” A batch of view rows.
• NotesViewEntry — “A view entry represents a row in a view.” One of those rows.

Get it from a NotesView:

Dim view As NotesView
Set view = db.GetView("Orders")
Dim vc As NotesViewEntryCollection
Set vc = view.AllEntries

To filter by sort key, use view.GetAllEntriesByKey(key).

The core advantage: ColumnValues without opening a document

This is the whole point. NotesViewEntry.ColumnValues is an array of that row’s value in each view column — values the view already computed and stored in the index. So:

Dim entry As NotesViewEntry
Set entry = vc.GetFirstEntry()
Do Until entry Is Nothing
    Dim cols As Variant
    cols = entry.ColumnValues        ' the row's column values, no document opened
    Print cols(0) & " / " & cols(1) & " / " & cols(2)
    Set entry = vc.GetNextEntry(entry)
Loop

Compare that to “loop the documents and GetItemValue each” — that reads every full document from disk into memory. When you only need the columns visible in the view, and the view already has them, ColumnValues is an order-of-magnitude difference. Reports, exports, batch inventory — anything that “just reads the values shown in the view” should go this way.

A caution the other direction: ColumnValues is indexed by the view’s column order, not by field name. Change the column order in the view design and the n in cols(n) shifts with it — so the cost of this trick is “coupled to the view design.” When you need stable field names, or a field the view doesn’t show, fall back to entry.Document.GetItemValue(...).

An entry’s identity and hierarchy

Each entry also carries document identity and view-hierarchy information:

IsCategory / IsTotal are handy — the docs state a ViewEntryCollection “never contain categories or totals”, but if you switch to a NotesViewNavigator to walk the view, you’ll meet category and total rows, and these flags tell them apart.

Batch operations: StampAll and set operations

A collection isn’t just for reading — it can modify in bulk:

• StampAll(itemName, value) — set one field across every document in the collection to the same value at once, without opening and saving each one; the server processes it in bulk and it’s very fast. Perfect for “set Status to Closed across this batch.”
• Set operations: Intersect, Merge, Subtract, Contains — apply set logic across two collections.
• PutAllInFolder / RemoveAll / UpdateAll and other batch actions.

' Set Status to Closed across the batch matching a key
Dim vc As NotesViewEntryCollection
Set vc = view.GetAllEntriesByKey("2026-Q2")
Call vc.StampAll("Status", "Closed")

What about Java and SSJS?

Consistent across all three: getColumnValues() reads column data without opening a document, stampAll() does the bulk update, the set operations are the same. When XPages back-end code builds a report or export, “read ColumnValues instead of opening documents” is the same performance key.

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