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  • New APIs for Domino JNA project, now available for XPages development

    Karsten Lehmann  16 January 2017 08:21:26
    It took some time (mainly because I was very busy and my main use case for the project is not XPages), but now the Domino JNA project is available for XPages development.

    That means that there is an XPages Extensibility API plugin available in the project's release section on Github that can be installed both in Domino Designer and on the Domino R9 server to use the API in your own applications.

    After installation, the API classes are available in SSJS and Java code including API source code.
    Since they are integrated with the JSF lifecycle, memory management is automatically handled by the plugin. That means that code using the API does not have to be wrapped in NotesGC.runWithAutoGC() blocks to automatically recycle allocated C handles and memory after a HTTP request.

    If you want to build your own release of the project (or of your own fork), please take a look at the section "Using Domino JNA in XPages applications". The Maven build has been tested on macOS and Windows.

    New features

    Tons of new features have been added to the project during the last months. It's difficult to keep up with test cases and extend code documentation.

    Here are a few highlights:
    • new APIs to use native NSF transactions (atomically create/modify/delete multiple documents in a database, see the Transactions class for known issues/limitations)
    • new APIs to read the ECL for a specific user
    • API to let NSF quickly filter a number of documents with a formula (not just the whole database as in IBM's Java API): NotesIDTable.filter(NotesDatabase db, String formula)
    • support added to direct attachment streaming to quickly skip a number of bytes (can be used to implement partial downloads via Accept-Ranges HTTP header, restricted to uncompressed attachments)
    • APIs to read/write database options with more than 100 available option constants (IBM's Java API contains only 13 of them)
    • Reading selected view rows specified as an ID table now also works on remote servers (use NotesCollection.updateFilters() to push your SelectedList ID table changes to remote servers before reading data)
    • Performance enhancements when inserting many IDs to a NotesIDTable

    To achieve the new functionality, lots of undocumented C API methods have been used that IBM should really add to the public API:
    • NIFReadEntriesExt
    • NIFIsNoteInView
    • NIFIsUpdateInProgress
    • NIFGetIDTableExtended
    • NIFCollectionUpToDate
    • NIFUpdateFilters
    • NIFIsTimeVariantView
    • IDScanBack
    • IDInsertRange
    • IDTableDifferences
    • IDTableReplaceExtended
    • ECLGetListCapabilities
    • NSFSearchExtended3
    • NSFDbGetOptionsExt
    • NSFDbSetOptionsExt
    • NSFTransactionBegin
    • NSFTransactionCommit
    • NSFTransactionRollback
    • extended FIND_XXX flags e.g. FIND_CATEGORY_MATCH to look up category rows in views
    • more than 100 DBOPTBIT_XXX constants to read/write database options

    Please let me know if there are any problems using the API.

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