Exporting data from Lotus Notes: C# interop, C, Java or LotusScript?

Question

I'm about to export a lot of data from a Lotus Notes db, and I'm wondering if anyone can shed any light on how exactly I can move forward on this point.

Notes has some views (lists with custom templates?) of some kind - are these saved in .nsf files on the Domino server, or are the .nsf files for email only?

If the .nsf files are actually the database files, what would be the best language / development pack to use to pull data from them?

Answer 1

If you need full-time synchronization between an existing Notes infrastructure and a RDBMS, LEI (Lotus Enterprise Integrator) or a third-party tool like Notrix would be your best bet -- it's as simple as defining a job and a schedule/trigger to run it. If you need to occasionally pull (or push) a subset of the data, then NotesSQL is probably the easiest approach. If you're not afraid of learning the structure of the NSF (Notes Storage Facility), then the LotusScript/COM API or the Java/CORBA API would give you finer-grained control.

If what you really need is a one-time dump of everything, then exporting all of the data notes to DXL (Domino XML) would give you the most complete version of the data you're going to get, and in a way that would let you recover and convert formatted Notes Rich Text, file attachments, and so on in a way that would be incredibly difficult to achieve otherwise. DXL is verbose, so don't say I didn't warn you, but it is pretty comprehensive as well. (The DOmino Designer Help entry on the NotesDXLExporter class has example code that is exactly on point.)

Answer 2

It all depends on what language you're familiar with.

If you know LotusScript well, then that would be my first choice since it's the most integrated with the platform.

If you don't know LotusScript that well, but you know C#/Java/C really well...then you shouldn't have any trouble using any of those APIs (and they should all be able to get the job done equally as well).

Answer 3

In Lotus Notes Domino all the data is stored in the .nsf files. This is true for all Notes databases, not just email. The data is all stored in documents which are basically collections of named fields containing values. The views are simply ways of indexing and displaying collections of documents based of specific criteria. The views can also calculate values based on the value of a field in the documents.

The Notes LotusScript and Java APIs are essentially identical and would be the simplest way to programmatically access the data. The C API is much lower level and probably overkill for this kind of thing.

Answer 4

You could look at NotesSQL, if you want to create an ODBC connection to an NSF file to pull data into SQL or Access. If all the data is contained within the view you could simply select all the documents and click Edit > Copy Selected As Table and paste into Excel.

To answer your other questions: Notes views are similar to SQL views - essentially a query on the data stored within the NSF. NSF files contain both the data and the structure of the application in one file.