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What is the best way and recommended practices for interacting with Lotus Notes from C#

Asked 2008-09-05T02:21:53.190
16

In particular, I have to extract all the messages and attachments from Lotus Notes files in the fastest and most reliable way. Another point that may be relevant is that I need to do this from a secondary thread.

Edit

Thanks for the answers - both of which are good. I should provide more background information.

We currently have a WinForms application with a background thread using the Notes COM API.

However it seems to be unstable. (Of course it may be we are doing something wrong.) For example, we have found we have to preinitialize the Notes session on the main thread or else the call to session.CreateDXLExporter() on the background thread throws an exception.

c# interop lotus-notes
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3 Answers

1

Back in the day I would have recommended N2N from Proposion, but that product has gone since Quest acquired Proposion.

That said, Proposion was proof that you can wrap the Notes API in a set of .Net classes safely. You can find some info on that in Bob Balaban's blog.

answered 2008-12-23T13:03:54.917
0

I would personally do this native in Notes in either LotusScript or Java. You can do a scheduled agent in Notes much easier than a service in C#.

answered 2009-08-21T17:20:42.477
0

I personally quite like Domino wrapped .NET assembly for COM API. When you develop your C# code you almost can imagine your dreams about a proper Notes IDE became true. But it has some drawbacks like for the version 6.5 (I haven't tried newer) you get your application crashes in many cases when the LotusScript code returns type mismatch for the parameter. But this is due to COM limitations of course.

At the same time the wrapper doesn't allow working with NotesUI classes. However I used reflections from very old Notes COM API examples to call NotesUI classes and it worked. It was handy when I developed an Outlook plug-in that required interaction with Notes client UI. I managed to create a simple wrapper for UI classes too.

answered 2010-10-22T09:48:33.163

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