Reading a remote URL in Domino LotusScript

Question

I have a remote RSS feed which has to be transformed into Notes documents using LotusScript.

I've looked through the documentation, but I can't find how to open a remote URL in order to retrieve its contents. In other words, some sort of wget- or curl-like functionality. Can anyone shed some light on how to do this? Using Java is not an option.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Check out the NotesDOMParser class - available in LotusScript - which lets you (indirectly) pull XML from a remote URL and process in a an XML DOM object.

You can pull the XML into a string using the MSXMLHTTP COM object, then use NotesStream to send the XML to the NotesDOMParser.

I have not tested, but the code would look something like this:

...
Set objXML = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
objXML.open "GET", sURL, False, "", ""
objXML.send("")
sXMLAsText = Trim$(objXML.responseText)

Set inputStream = session.CreateStream
inputStream.Open (sXMLAsText)
Set domParser=session.CreateDOMParser(inputStream, outputStream)
domParser.Process
...

Documentation: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/domhelp/v8r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.designer.domino.main.doc/H_NOTESDOMPARSER_CLASS.html

Answer 2

You can't open a remote URL (whether it's HTTP or some other protocol) using native Lotusscript: the object library simply doesn't support it. If you're running on a Windows server, you should be able to use the MS XMLHttp DLLs to get a handle on your remote file via a URL, as specified by the previous answer. (Alternatively, this link specifies how to parse and open a UNC path with Lotusscript—again, Windows only).

All that said, if I understand you correctly, you're not using HTTP to access the remote file at all. If the RSS file is just on a simple path, why can't you open the file for parsing in the normal way with Lotusscript?