scoombs and vroom,
The getnotes.pl program is a very simple client for notes. I connected to Lotus notes 4.5 and I wrote the program about a year ago so it may not work properly anymore. I don't have lotus notes at my new company. :( I would appreciate it if you would try it so I can see if it still works. If you let me know what problems you are having or what you would like to see the program do post back I would be happy to help.

Its kind of frustrating that the getnotes.pl program took me about two weeks to write and IMHO is way more interesting than the ebay pager program, which has about 3 time the reputation points and took two seconds to write.

If there is a Lotus Notes ODBC client library for Linux, just use DBD::ODBC. If you can't get the ODBC library for Linux but can get it for another platform and still want to run your script on Linux, you should look at DBD::Proxy/DBI::ProxyServer. In a DBD::Proxy setup you would set up a DBI::ProxyServer process running on the box w/ the ODBC client library and it would connect to the Notes database. Then you use DBD::Proxy in your client program (running anywhere) to connect to the DBI::ProxySerer process. I know thats a lot of layers, but it does actually work. I've used this technique to connect a program on a Linux box to an MS-Access DB ... its more stable than you might think.

Talk about n-tier!!

Linux Wkst.        Windoze Server
--------------    ------------------------------
|Linux| DBD  |    | DBI  | DBD | ODBC  | Lotus |
|Apps | Proxy|--->| Proxy| ODBC| Driver| Client|
--------------    ------------------------------
                                            |
  -------------                             |
  |Lotus Notes| <----------------------------
  |Server     |
  -------------
   AIX RS/6000

Is this what you're talking about?

I am trying to write a script that will take a name off the command line and return the internet email address as stored in the company global address book in Lotus Notes. The following script will loop through all records and print out the data, which I can redirect to a temp file for grep'ing later, but I would like to look it up realtime. I saw the @dblookup function in Lotus, but wasn't successful at running it via perl. Any ideas? Your help is greatly appreciated.

use strict;
use English;
use warnings;
use vars qw($opt_d $opt_v);
use Getopt::Std;
use Win32::OLE;

# Open the email database in Lotus Notes
# (To use another person's email database, switch to
#  their userid in Notes before running this program)
my $notes = Win32::OLE->new('Notes.NotesSession')
             or die "Can't open Lotus Notes";
my $database = $notes->GetDatabase("LNSERVER","names.nsf");
#my $database = $notes->GetDatabase("","names.nsf");

# Verify the server connection
print "Connected to ", $database->{Title}, 
      " on ", $database->{Server}, "\n";

# Loop over all of the folders
foreach my $viewname (GetViews($database)) {

  # Get the object for this View
  print "Checking folder $viewname...\n";
  my $view = $database->GetView($viewname);

  # Get the first document in the folder
  my $num = 1;
  my $doc = $view->GetFirstDocument;
  next unless $doc;
  GetInfo($num,  $doc);

  # Get the remaining documents in the folder
  while ($doc = $view->GetNextDocument($doc)) {
    $num++;
    GetInfo($num, $doc);
  }
}

sub GetInfo
{
  my ($num, $doc) = @_;

  my $FirstName = $doc->{'FirstName'}->[0];
  my $LastName = $doc->{'LastName'}->[0];
  my $MiddleInitial = $doc->{'MiddleInitial'}->[0];
  my $email = $doc->{'ShortName'}->[0];
  $email .= '@uhc.com';
  print "$FirstName $MiddleInitial $LastName\t$email\n";
}

sub GetViews {
   return ("People");
}

@DbLookup is not valid outside of the Notes client context and cannot be accessed via this method. Tough beans. Normally you follow a pattern something like the following when you're looking for something conceptually like @DbLookup. I'm posting this in LotusScript and you'll have to translate that into perl. I haven't use the OLE interface to perl so I don't want to just "wing" it.

If you follow that it's just (a) get the view, (b) find document(s) that match your criteria, (c) do something with them. Easy peasy.

If you need something faster/better then either (a) write an interface to the C or C++ API DominoPerl, (b) use the Java API (which works nicely) or (c) don't do it.

 Const C_VIEW = "People"
 Const C_KEY  = "Marvin Martian/IT/SomeCompany"
 Const C_ITEM = "Fullname"

 Dim S As NotesSession
 Dim Db As NotesDatabase
 Dim View As NotesView
 Dim Doc As NotesDocument
 
 Set S = New NotesSession
 Set Db = S.CurrentDatabase
 Set View = Db.GetView( C_VIEW )
 Set Doc = View.GetDocumentByKey( C_KEY, True )

 If Doc.HasItem( C_ITEM ) Then
     Print C_ITEM & ": " & Doc.GetFirstItem( C_ITEM ).Text
 Else
     Print C_ITEM & " Doesn't exist!"
 End If
[download]

Equivalent OLE code *might* look like this but you'll need to try it out for your self. In general you'll need to check out the LotusScript object model to see what is available.

 use constant C_VIEW => "People";
 use constant C_KEY => "Marvin Martian/IT/SomeCompany";
 use constant C_ITEM => "Fullname";

 use strict;
 use warnings;
 use Win32::OLE;

 my $notes = Win32::OLE->new('Notes.NotesSession')
              or die "Can't open Lotus Notes";
 my $db = $notes->GetDatabase(@{&C_DB()});
 die "Database was not opened" unless $db->IsOpen;
 
 my $view = $db->GetView( C_VIEW );
 my $doc = $view->GetDocumentByKey( C_KEY, -1 );

 if (defined $doc) {
     print C_ITEM . ": " . $doc->GetFirstItem( C_ITEM )->Text() . "\n"
+;
 }
 else {
     print C_ITEM . " Doesn't exist!\n"
 }
[download]

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