Configuring the Lotus Notes View

Now that we have the server side setup, we can look at the data in Notes itself. The NotesSQL driver sees all Lotus Notes Forms & Views as 'tables' and so you can query them as such using standard SQL. However, try to keep the queries as simply as possible as the driver can be a bit tempermental at times, if you need to do any fancy stuff, do it either in the View as an extra column or in the ASP.

The best way to interact with the driver is to create a new View(s) specifically for this purpose. The driver used the Programatic Name of each column, so ensure that these are all set and not left to the default ones, this is also worth double checking if you change the Column Label or the Column Function. On the whole try and have all the names of the View and the Columns without spaces. Populate your new View with all the fields that you will need to query and ensure that they are sourced from the same place as the 'live' information in your system.

For our example we need to create view containing the usernames and passwords of our users. To make the matching process easier we will add another column which is the uppercase values of our usernames, this allows us to convert the user entered data into the same case when we query the database and stops any rejections due to incorrect case of the username.

Now that we have the driver and the view ready, we can write some code using Classic ASP to connect to the Notes database and get our data.