Consuming web services in Notes and Domino 8
Tim Tripcony
I haven't seen much discussion about how easy it really is to consume web services in Notes/Domino 8 (perhaps precisely because it is so easy), so I thought I'd outline exactly how one goes about providing and consuming services now.
Let's use a very basic example. Create a script library and toss this in the Declarations:
Public Class House
Private currentColor As String
Private currentValue As Long
Public Sub buy (price As Long)
Let Me.currentValue = price
End Sub
Public Function color() As String
Let Me.color = Me.currentColor
End Function
Public Function value() As Long
Let Me.value = Me.currentValue
End Function
Public Sub sell (price As Long)
Let Me.currentValue = price
End Sub
Public Sub paint (newColor As String)
Let Me.currentColor = newColor
End Sub
End Class
Save that library, and create a web service. Include the library you just created via a Use statement in the Options, then in the properties of the service, specify House as the PortType class. The service doesn't need any code of its own, because it's aware of the House class via the Use statement and knows that's the class that defines the service methods.
Now it's time to consume the service. From within the service, click "Export WSDL", and save the file anywhere you can get to it later. In any Domino database (including, but not limited to, the database containing the web service), create a new script library (can be Java if you prefer, but in this example, we'll use LotusScript). At the bottom of the window you'll see a WSDL drop-down button. Click that and select "Import WSDL". It'll warn you that this will overwrite your script library (which is fine, since that's precisely what we want); click OK and select the file you just exported. Here's what you'll see:
%INCLUDE "lsxsd.lss"
Class House As PortTypeBase
Sub NEW
Call Service.Initialize ("UrnDefaultNamespaceHouseService", _
"HouseService.Domino", "http://localhost", _
"House")
End Sub
Sub BUY(PRICE As Long)
Call Service.Invoke("BUY", PRICE)
End Sub
Function COLOR() As String
Let COLOR = Service.Invoke("COLOR")
End Function
Function VALUE() As Long
Let VALUE = Service.Invoke("VALUE")
End Function
Sub SELL(PRICE As Long)
Call Service.Invoke("SELL", PRICE)
End Sub
Sub PAINT(NEWCOLOR As String)
Call Service.Invoke("PAINT", NEWCOLOR)
End Sub
End Class
Any of this seem familiar?
Only one change to the library is needed: replace the reference to "http://localhost" (in the Service.Initialize call) with "http://server/path/db.nsf/servicename?OpenWebService" (where server is the IP or DNS address of your Domino server, path/db.nsf is the full filepath of the database containing the service, and servicename is the name of the web service design element).
At this point, you can save the new library and include it anywhere you need to consume the service. And actually consuming it is this easy:
Dim myHouse As New House()
Call myHouse.buy(200000)
Call myHouse.paint("Purple")
Call myHouse.sell(5000000) 'Keep dreaming
But the real beauty of web services is that it allows you to execute functions against an application you know nothing about, whether it's inside your network or not. For example, if you download this file and import it into a script library in any of your applications, you can pull a random quote from my site as easy as this:
Dim Quotes As New Quotes()
Dim Quote As Quote
Set Quote = Quotes.getRandomQuote()
Msgbox Quote.Content & Chr(13) & "- " & Quote.Source