Mastering PowerBuilder

Introduction

Lotus Notes software is a GroupWare available from Lotus corporation which is a subsidiary of IBM currently. A Lotus Notes server maintains one or more databases. Unlike any other DBMS/RDBMS where data is stored in record/field or row/column format, Lotus Notes databases are stored as documents. These documents can contain rich-text documents, images, audio or video files and so on. Lotus Notes allows different people to work on the same document at the same time and takes care of the update conflicts after editing.

A Lotus Notes form is a template used to author documents --such as memos, letters, discussions, order forms and so on. When user wants to write a document, he chooses a form (document template) depending on his needs and authors that document.

A view is a query that is stored in the Lotus Notes database and displays one more document details depending on the query definition. In simple terms, it is like a SELECT statement with WHERE, HAVING, GROUP BY clauses. You need to define the Lotus Notes views in the Lotus Notes and store the view. When you want to see the documents available in the database, you need to choose one of the view. For example, a view that displays only receipts, another to display issues, another view to display all products that have less than re-order-level balance and so on.

What can we do with Lotus Notes database from a PowerBuilder application? Well, you can access Lotus Notes views, documents from PowerBuilder application using PowerBuilder library for Lotus Notes. You can even create a new document, edit/delete an existing document. You can even send e-mails using VIM (Vendor Independent Messages) APIs. One more powerful feature of this library is that you can make queries on the Lotus Notes database and retrieve documents. Unlike the views which are stored in the Lotus Notes, the queries you create in PowerBuilder are not stored in the Lotus Notes, instead stored in the PowerBuilder library.