Month: June 2006

A Lotus Connector is a powerful means for accessing an Oracle table. To have it work properly, the machine from which the Lotus code is being executed (wether a Domino server for Web operations or a Notes client) needs a working copy of the Oracle client software. The Lotus Conector will simply use some client libraries for accessing the networked database, so the client needs not be running before executing the Lotus code, nor it needs any custom configurations for accessing the database, like any changes to the tnsnames.ora file.

In fact, all of the conection data that would usually go into the tnsnames.ora configuration file, can be much more conveniently stored inside a LotusScript library, like the following

Booking a company ID

This is a very simple use of the Lotus Connector clockwork.
There is a SAP application where companies are added to a database using a SAP data entry screen. For some reason, the time at which all the needed data is available, is too far in the future (;-), and some guy needs the company ID as soon as possible, well before the SAP application will provide one.

Behind the scenes, the SAP application returns as a company ID the record ID of that company into the companies Oracle table. Finally that record ID is a value of an Oracle sequence, which is incremented whenever a new record is added to the companies table. So it is possible to book a company ID, simply by incrementing the sequence. This means that no record is added to the database, but that ID is unique and will never be used for any other record.

A CRC is a number which is supposed to change accordingly to the string its computed upon. So it can be used to detect if the user made changes to a chosen subset of the fields of a document.

When saving the document, just join the text values of the fields in an ordered manner, then get the CRC of that string and store it as a new field value. When checking the document for changes to those fields, make the string again and get its CRC. If the saved CRC and the one just computed are equal, then you should be reasonably sure that those field values have not changed, but if the CRC does change, then you can be completely sure that those field have changed as well!

A CRC32 class comes with the java.util.zip package, and LS2J can be used to access and use it.

Here is the code for a Java library, name it CRC32 Java

And here is a LS2J wrapper, just for making it simpler to use in LotusScript. It’s a LotusScript library and you should name it CRC32