A new set of APIs

One of the important news happening with the Domino 10 launch is the possibility to use the NodeJS programming model to interact with the Domino 10 runtime.

As part of this evolution, our partner HCL has published

  • the “App Dev Pack”, which is the server-side component that allows a Domino 10 installation to support a new set of APIs and the new “Domino Query Language”

  • and the “domino-db NPM” component, which provides a NodeJS package that allows NodeJS developers to simply and easily create applications that make use of the features exposed by the “App Dev Pack”.

It is not the goal of this article to drill in the details of how to install and configure the “App Dev Pack”. In what follows, we assume that this server-side component is installed and functioning on your Domino 10 server.

This article focuses on how a power user can, transparently, use the “domino-db NPM” component by means of the new Node-RED dominodb package. This new Node-RED package aims to provide a very simple and programmer-friendly abstraction of the APIs exposed by the “domino-db NPM” package in order to make it simple, even for not NodeJS experts, to create integrations with Domino 10 with “very little” or “no programming” skills.

The APIs exposed by the “domino-db NPM” component allow to perform CRUD operations on a given Domino Database. Those APIs are described in the README.md and Reference.md files included in the NPM package. There are, roughly, 3 types of APIs:

  • APIs that work on “sets” of documents.
    You can:

    • Get a set of documents specified either by a DQL Query or by a list of unique Ids
    • Replace a set of documents (or a set of items within the documents) specified either by a DQL Query or by a list of unique ids
    • Delete a set of documents (or a set of items within the documents) specified either by a DQL Query or by a list of unique ids
    • Create a set of documents

  • APIs that work on a single document.
    You can Read, Replace, Delete or Create a document specified by its unique id

  • Service APIs.
    These APIs allow you to connect to a Domino Server, to select a Domino database to work with, to get information about the connection that has been established.
    An interesting Service API allows the programmer to explain a DQL Query before running it. It can become extremely useful when evaluating the optimal way to query a large Domino database.

The use of these APIs requires some familiarity with advanced Javascript programming (promises, the new Async features of ES6, error management etc.
This may quickly become an obstacle for power users or for Domino programmers who are more focused on the business logic and/or on the data that need to be manipulated. Here is an example of the code fragment that is required to create a single document using the new APIs.

Note:

this article is based on the V 0.9.7 version of the node-red-contrib-dominodb package.
This simple set of nodes can be used to quickly and safely access to, virtually, all the APIs exposed by the “domino-db NPM” component. The “domino-db NPM” component is a pre-requisite for the Node-RED package and needs to be installed before the node-red-contrib-dominodb Node-RED package (please refer to the Installation section of the package for details).