Lotus Domino Server Access from iPhone

Question

Hello,

I am new to lotus notes and domino server. I want my iPhone application to have access of domino server. I want to get Contacts from domino server in my iPhone Application.

I googled for it,I found many documents. but I couldn't find perfect data flow for that. can any one explain me how can i get Contacts/Calendar/Mail from domino Server.

What is the purpose of using java Agents for lotus notes? In simpler word, I want to make Lotus notes for iPhone with iPhone SDK 3.0.

Thanks,

Answer 1

As you can't use the lotus java libraries to access Lotus Domino, your best bet would be to access Lotus Domino via HTTP to get the data. The simplest way (if you have no experience whatsoever developing in Lotus Notes) would be to try and get the data from the existing views in names.nsf (the Server Directory) and the mail databases. To do so, you can call a view with the following parameters:

http://www.yourserver.com/names.nsf/($users)?readviewentries
http://www.yourserver.com/names.nsf/($users)?readviewentries&outputformat=JSON

In each case you are getting the data from the view "($users)" in the "names.nsf" database, in XML or JSON format.

If you need more data than is available in the existing views, I would recommend against creating new views (as it would imply modifying the standard templates). For that, I would create a new database with agents that recovered de info you need and returned it in the format you prefer.

Agents are just blocks of code (usually written in LotusScript, which is similar to VBasic, or Java). They can be scheduled to run at certain times or events, or called directly (from notes or via URL). You could call an Agent using an url as such:

http://www.yourserver.com/names.nsf/myAgent?openagent

From the agent you could access any data in the server (if you have permission to) and return a "text/html/whatever not binary" to the program requesting the URL.

Note: Lotus Domino 8.5.1, that has just been released, includes the ActiveSync protocol, so I'm not sure about the need to recreate the Notes Client in the iPhone.

Answer 2

You mention contacts initially, and then you mention mail / calendar / contacts. What are you trying to achieve in your iPhone application? If you're trying to build some kind of Notes client locally, that seems crazy. There are two options out there already:

1. Simply use iNotes (i.e. web access for Notes mail etc.) which works well in Mobile Safari or;
2. Use the IBM Lotus Traveler product, which uses ActiveSync to use Domino mail / calendaring / contacts with the native clients on the iPhone.