from Domino to Infinity

How To Extend Domino Authentication For Websites, Single Sign-On and Persistent Sessions

Stephan H. Wissel — Mon, 7 Nov 2005 10:41:10 +0800

There is an excellent article over at Agileview, the blog of Agileware. If you are not into Websphere or DSAPI, you now have an option. A must read!

Importing MS Excel into Lotus Notes via XML -- the code

Stephan H. Wissel — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 23:58:36 +0800

In August we published a XSLT stylesheet, that can transfom Excel XML into a more record like XML structure. The missing part is the Notes side of the exercise, which I will show today. There is a functional database in the download section. The agent code reads some values from a configuration document and applies the listed transformations to the xml before invoking the sax parser to read the values. We opted for multipe transformation runs to be able to massage the data after it has been transformed from the rather crude Excel XML form.
But you are not limited to Excel. Any XML you can transform into the ... format can be imported.

Let's look at the core of the agent code:

'make sure all conversion files are detached
Call DetachTransformationFiles(tempDir,doc,transformationNames)

'Pipelined call to XSLT Transformation an SAX Parser
Call TransformFileToSax(transformationNames,fileNames(0),doc, xsltParameters)

After detaching the XSLT files to the system temp directory we run a cascaded transform:

Function TransformFileToSax(transformationNames As Variant,fileName As String, doc As NotesDocument, Parameters List As String) As Boolean
'Transformes the input file in a series of transformation, one each for each name in transformationNames
'Then hands over the stream to the Sax parser for further processing
Dim s As New NotesSession
Dim i As Integer
Dim sourceStream As NotesStream
Dim tempDir As String
Dim transformers() As NotesXSLTransformer
Dim styleStreams() As NotesStream
Dim loopcount As Integer
Dim saxParser As NotesSAXParser

On Error Goto Err_TransformFileToSax

'Create the Import Definition
Set obj_ImportDefinition = New clsImportDefinition(doc) '<-- this is where the magic is

'Create the Sax parser
Set saxParser = s.CreateSAXParser()
On Event SAX_Characters From saxParser Call SAXCharacters
On Event SAX_EndElement From saxParser Call SAXEndElement
On Event SAX_StartElement From saxParser Call SAXStartElement
On Event SAX_EndDocument From saxParser Call SAXEndDocument

If Isempty(transformationNames) Then
'No transformation has to be done, just load a stream and hand it to the sax parser
Set sourceStream = s.CreateStream
Call sourceStream.Open(fileName)
Call saxParser.SetInput(sourceStream)
Call saxParser.Process
Goto Exit_TransformFileToSax
End If

'We need to feed the result of the first transformation to the second, second to third etc.
'We will use an array of transformers and use the pipelineing capabilities of NotesXSLT to chain them

tempDir = Environ("Temp")+"\"
loopcount = Ubound(transformationNames) 'How many loops do we have
Redim transformers(loopcount) 'We initialize the exact number of transformers...
Redim styleStreams(loopcount) 'Also the exact numbers of styles

Set sourceStream = s.CreateStream 'the source file
Call sourceStream.Open(fileName,"Unicode") 'Open the source

'Now the chaining loop <-- this is the interesting part, we chain the Notes Streams from file i/o until SAX Parser,
For i = 0 To loopcount Step 1
'Create the transformer
Set transformers(i) = s.CreateXSLTransformer
'Feed in the parameters
Forall p In Parameters
Call transformers(i).AddParameter(Listtag(p), p)
End Forall

'Create the style sheet and link it
Set styleStreams(i) = s.CreateStream
Call styleStreams(i).Open(tempDir+transformationNames(i),"Unicode")
Call transformers(i).SetStylesheet(styleStreams(i))

'Link the input
If i = 0 Then
Call transformers(i).SetInput(sourceStream)
Else
Call transformers(i).SetInput(transformers(i-1))
End If
Next

'Link the final output --- all other outputs are linked via input of the next one
Call transformers(loopcount).SetOutput(saxParser)

'Process
Call transformers(0).Process 'Just start the first one, pipelining will take care of the others

'Wind down
Call SourceStream.Close
For i = 0 To loopcount
Call styleStreams(i).close
Next

TransformFileToSax = True 'If we got here it worked

Exit_TransformFileToSax:
Exit Function

Err_TransformFileToSax:
Print Error$ + " in TransformFileToSax"
TransformFileToSax = False
Resume exit_TransformFileToSax

End Function

The Sax stuff is quite simple...

Transforming DXL to a record/field structure.

Stephan H. Wissel — Sat, 1 Oct 2005 00:00:00 +0800

Gary is updating his samples to Domino 6.x. One challenge he encountered is how to transform DXL to something that looks more like a record. In LotusScript you chain a NotesDXLExporter with a NotesXSLTransformer and apply a stylesheet. Here it gets a little tricky. Since Notes knows multi-values you are never too sure what you will get. Also there is MIME and RichText. Excluding these two, the following stylesheet does the trick (might be incomplete):

xmlns:d="http://www.lotus.com/dxl">

;

;

(Get it in the download section)

Importing MS Excel into Lotus Notes via XML

Stephan H. Wissel — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 22:43:01 +0800

A very typical task in any Notes environment is to import MS-Excel into Lotus Notes. While the client sports import filters (with an eventual round trip through the venerable 1-2-3 format, the server doesn't allow an import. OLE is rarely an option since (rightfully) any administrator rather runs naked into the CEO's office than to allow desktop applications (read MS Office) to be installed on the server.
Since Office 2000 there is a new possibility: One could save an MS-Excel file as XML Spreadsheet and use XML processing to extract the data. However the rather harmless looking table:

turns into quite a LOT of XML. Before even thinking of processing it we need to clean-up the code.

Domino as XML Documents

Stephan H. Wissel — Tue, 7 Jun 2005 15:37:27 +0800

Richard and Brian had their take on Domino documents as XML. In my comment to Brian's post I suggested to use webDAV to achieve that today. Using webDAV Domino databases and folders could be displayed as folders (not so sure about views) and Domino documents as XML documents. webDAV comes with support for access control, so Domino's security (readers/authors/acl) would be in force. You could even use filters (a.k.a. XSLT transformations), so the XML could be domain specific rather than raw XML.
A prove of concept servlet doesn't seem too much magic. What would one do with such a capability?

Legacy code?

Stephan H. Wissel — Mon, 6 Jun 2005 15:14:13 +0800

"Before we get started, do you know what 'Legacy Code' means? It's code that works".
Via Ben

Getting a Gannt chart out of Domino

Stephan H. Wissel — Mon, 11 Apr 2005 17:34:41 +0800

Alan Bell of Dominux Consulting describes how to use jfree.org's Java libraries to produce a Gannt chart in Domino.

Detailed documentation how to connect Tomcat 5.5 to Domino

Stephan H. Wissel — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 21:38:48 +0800

Dan Simmonds just published a detailed documentation about his experience with connecting Tomcat 5.5 and Domino 6.5.1. A must read.

Purifying (x)HTML

Peter de Waard — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 21:50:15 +0800

Richard Schwarz asked the question how to purify HTML that has been submitted in a Blog. Stephan suggested to transform the HTML to proper xHTML first using jTidy and then, since you gain valid XML (validating against the xhtml schema), filter it using XSLT.
We had a quick session and came up with a template you can download in the downloads section of this blog. First we had to decide on the general mode of operation: Either: "Everything is ok unless explicitly forbidden" or: "Only tags that are explicitly allowed will go through. We opted for the first one. The result was about 4k of XSLT, that serves as the template for your specific needs.

Single Sign-on for Tomcat and Domino

Stephan H. Wissel — Mon, 6 Dec 2004 10:34:15 +0800

There is an excellent article on www.automatedlogic.com how to integrate Tomcat and Domino. A must read.