Re: Django - Lotus Notes

On Mon, 24 Sep 2012 23:35:52 -0700 (PDT), Markus Christen
<markuschristen84@gmail.com> declaimed the following in
gmane.comp.python.django.user:

> I have to create a web-service and i hope it works with Django. My plan is
> connecting to a Lotus Notes database. Can this work? If yes, how? Else no,
> how can i do this, witch programm do i need? I will programm it based on a
> Python language. I am a new programmer and used Python just for one week
> till now...

Can Lotus Notes be accessed using an ODBC driver?

Does Django have an ODBC backend? (I'm not far enough awake to
google for it)

Based upon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_Notes#Database I
suspect it will not be directly usable: "Document-oriented databases
such as Lotus Notes allow multiple values in items (fields), do not
require a schema, ..." -- a Django Model maps directly to a schema, so
you're already in trouble; and a normalized relational database does not
have multiple values in fields (nor multiple fields holding values for
the same "item" -- one breaks them out into a second table where each
record has a reference to the parent record).

On the other hand, "A Lotus Notes database can be mapped to a
relational database using tools like DECS, [LEI], JDBCSql for Domino or
NotesSQL.[11]", implies there may be hope (if NotesSQL can map to an
ODBC driver).

It appears the IBM approach would be to use
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPages

"As of version 6, Lotus established an XML programming interface in
addition to the options already available. The Domino XML Language (DXL)
provides XML representations of all data and design resources in the
Notes model, allowing any XML processing tool to create and modify
Notes/Domino data." suggests one approach, since Python does have a
number of XML processing libraries, and I'd hope the "programming
interface" could be accessed using ctypes, especially via the C toolkit:
"External to the Lotus Notes application, IBM provides toolkits in C,
C++, and Java to connect to the Domino database and perform a wide
variety of tasks. The C toolkit is the most mature, ..."

But... NONE of the above are features Django is designed to work
with. While Django has an object-relational mapper type interface to
work with relational databases, and can also work with some object
databases, "Models" are still fixed layouts (defined in the Django
application), not conducive to the potentials of two Notes "documents"
having different definitions of fields.

--
Wulfraed Dennis Lee Bieber AF6VN
wlfraed@ix.netcom.com HTTP://wlfraed.home.netcom.com/

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