Folks,

This is rather complex (or at least it's complex to me ..) so I hope you'll bear with me while I explain.

I need to create a Bill of Lading program that will, in part, use data from a legacy system to which there is no direct access.

The developers of that system have created a routine that will dump the contents of an order into a flat file as soon as a "Pick Ticket" is generated for the warehouse.

My task is to take the contents of the flat file (OrderNumber, CustomerCode, ProductCode, ProductQty, ProductCode, ProductQty, ...), merge it with additional information from another database (product description, etc) and load the result into a DB2 database which is the back end of a Lotus Notes application.

My initial plan was to to use Maintain for all of this, and skip the Lotus Notes integration, but the boss won't spend the money to get me some assistance with Maintain (and likely will kill the Maintain portion of our licence in any case because he objects to the IBI maintenance fees).

So I'm left with MODIFY, which is OK.

Now with that out of the way, here's my issue. I need to either:
a) Trigger a FEX from Notes to run on the WF server that will retrieve the flat file on demand and process it, or
b) Have a ReportCaster procedure that will detect the presence of the flat file and process it as soon as it exists

It would be nice if I could use ReportCaster Alerts, but unfortunately we don't use Managed Reporting so that option isn't available. And I'm thinking that a ReportCaster schedule that runs every minute sounds like a lot of work for nothing.

So: For option a) I could issue a URL from a button in Lotus Notes. Is it possible for the URL to contain a parameter (OrderNumber) that will start a FEX to run the MODIFY in the background to populate the DB2 table? I don't particularly want the URL to trigger a visible HTML page. Maybe an RPC instead ?

For option b) I found the following post which looks quite promising. Any advances on this or other approaches would be much appreciated:
http://forums.informationbuild...291060541#6291060541

One more thing... After the info is passed to the Lotus Notes front end and added to / modified, I would like a Print button that will run a different FEX to produce a PDF. The data at this point will either be stored in Notes format or in DB2.


Thanks in advance!

George

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kathleen Butler,

Not sure about what Notes can do, but if you had the WebFOCUS (EDA) client installed on the notes server, and notes could call the client, it can call the WebFOCUS server and initiate the run.

Notes just needs to be able to call a local program.

Hi Waz,

Thanks for that. We have the WF client and server currently installed on the same VM. The Notes Domino server is on a different VM. Domino can do a lot. Virtually anything to do with inter-process communications. The trouble is that that is not my area of expertise. Do you think we can have a separate instance of the client running on the Notes Domino server?

I should have asked where your fexes are, as this method requires them to be on the WF server not the MRE/Repository.

The client is only part of the web client. It can be installed by installing a server with a client licence. Not sure if you need to be licenced to do that.

The other option would be a web call.

Fexes are on the server. We don't use MRE.

(I'm going to have to start using the past tense soon ... I quit my job after 30 years last Friday. Not exactly desperate for work, but something to occupy my brain would be nice ... )

If installing another instance of the server requires a licence, that ain't going to happen. The reason we are still on 7705 is because the boss refuses to pay the maintenance ...

I found this about passing parameters, but my HTML is weak. I'd need to pass the parameter to the HTML in the first place and from there to the FEX. Time to do some studying !

Other options available with Notes Domino include SOAP (we are still on WF 7705) - Anyone want to comment on that?

The client licence only installs the client part.

And the licence is always the same. May be worth talking Tech Support to see if its a cost or not.

7.7.05 supports SOAP, You should be able to set that up on the WF server. I think I did it years ago on 7.6 or earlier