268687 - Add Lotus Domino support [extension fodder]

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Calendar :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Scott Javoroski]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; chrome://navigator/locale/navigator.properties; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; chrome://navigator/locale/navigator.properties; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

I hope I'm adding this request in the right way.
When will this product support Domino Calendaring, if at all? I see a bunch of
other Calendar programs listed as being future support, but not Domino

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.




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Comment 1

[gekacheka]

Is there a public API?  IBM's site seems to list only their proprietary clients
and Outlook plugin.

  Client options
    * Lotus Notes
    * Lotus Domino Web Access
    * Lotus Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook
    * Lotus Domino WebMail
http://www.lotus.com/products/product4.nsf/wdocs/dominohomepage

iCalendar support appears primarily for email messages, no mention yet of direct
calendar clients such as Lotus Organizer.
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21102862

Comment 2

[Scott Javoroski]

Here is a link to the Notes/Domino toolkits -
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/toolkits/index.html

the Lotus Notes Client contains the calendar, it's part of the same database.

Comment 3

[Rod Whiteley]

Perhaps it would help if you specify what kind of support you really need.

A program can use various Notes APIs to talk to a Notes client on the same
machine, but it cannot use Domino's proprietary protocol to talk to the Domino
server directly.

It is not quite true that the calendar is part of the Notes client.  It is part
of the user's mail database, which is normally on a server with replicas on one
or more client machines.

Also, calendaring in Notes goes far beyond the iCal standard.  Data and function
would be lost if you transfer calendar entries to or from MozCal.

Comment 4

[Matthew (lilmatt) Willis]

Reassigning all automatically assigned bugs from Mostafa to nobody@m.o

Bugspam filter: TorontoMostafaMove

Comment 5

[cmtalbert]

We would love to have a provider that supports Lotus Notes, but we cannot code it ourselves.  Please help us out with an extension.  You can check out the Provider for Google Calendar to get an idea of what would be entailed. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/sunbird/addon/4631

Comment 6

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

I am playing with this. Not setting to ASSIGNED, since I don't know how long it will take for me to complete, but I have some simple steps working with the Notes API (which does mean you need some dlls and maybe even the notes client installed)

* Read a local .nsf file, extracting calendar events
* Translate most fields into their calendar equivalent

The missing steps for support are therefore:

* Add, Delete, modify an event
* Alarms, Recurrence, room reservations, etc.

I have read in the API, that recurrence is not possible through it. Maybe I'm not using the correct version though.

If anyone wants to help, feel free to contact me.

Comment 7

[Peter Rosenberg]

As certified Notes Developer since Notes 3.0a and later certified as Domino Admin, I might be able to clarify.
First, you must read this introduction to iCAL support in the Technote (FAQ) #1102862 : Support for iCalendar and vCard in Domino
http://www-1.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=463&q1=1102862&uid=swg21102862&loc=en_US&cs=utf-8&cc=us&lang=all
Versions supporing this is: Domino 6.x, 7.x (and I assume later versions will too)
From the Technote, you will be see that iCAL is only supported in the Messaging Interface to Domino, meaning that the only iCAL support is for:
- Incoming iCAL messages from Internet (users) to Domino users (Notes, iNotes etc)
- Outgoing iCAL messages from Domino users (Notes, iNotes etc) to Internet users
All is required, is that both ends meet the RfC Internet standard RFC 2445, across the SMTP (MIME) Communication

In other words, Domino does NOT expose its Calendar's (for hosted users) to the Internet (like for example Google Calendar).

Hope it clarifies.

Comment 8

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

But Notes does have an API to connect to calendars in either a local or remote database, correct? This is what I am using to connect and its working (not well, but its working ;)

Comment 9

[Peter Rosenberg]

Yes, there's a C-API that can create, modify and delete calendar instances (called Documents (& Fields) with Notes DOM).
When doing this, the API cannot bypass the security model of Domino, so in order to work, proper access must be thought of prior to the Design and Coding using this API.
The API has no notion of iCAL (I believe), so I assume, when an invite i 'sent' across from the Chairperson to Invitees (over Internet) it gets converted to iCAL format (within MIME) as part of the Router software (SMTP).
I have actually tried from my Notes 7 client to invite another (also myself) with Gmail. And its ends up there as an iCAL Invite, with a nice button 'Add to Calendar', which saves it to GCAL. The Alarm notifications and all the crusial details seems to be preserved across. Have a screenshot of it, but cannot attach it here (a shame) ;-(

Cheers

Comment 10

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

Attachment: Lotus Notes Provider - WiP

This is basically a dump of my notes provider directories. You will need a checked out calendar tree, then you can extract it in the mozilla/ directory. You will have to add the notes directory to calendar/providers/Makefile.in to build automatically. You also need the notes api, I believe I used 7.0, at least I had a lcppn70.dll.

Note this was written back in 2007 in times where we didn't even have 0.7. It will probably need some extra work to be made compatible with the current nightlies. Also, I'm not totally sure the files work with 0.7pre as is, since I didn't necessarily clean up the tree to a working state back then. I have a few other versions in the versions/ directory, they might help you tweak the files to at least work with 0.7(pre).

If you need any help getting things set up, feel free to ask Fallen in #calendar on irc.mozilla.org or write me an email.

Comment 11

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][📱📆]]

Note that you will often find that the provider crashes the application. This is not something I had fixed, so you will have to fix it yourself :-) I believe the problem is that the lotus notes api needs every thread to be specially initialized. This requires using the mozilla Thread API, I believe it was called PRThread.

Simple usage: Create a Lotus Notes .nsf file with calendar data, add the file:// url as the location in the new calendar wizard.

Comment 12

[Martin Schröder [:mschroeder]]

As noted years ago, such a feature (if anyone still wants it) is better done as an extension.