This file contains instructions on running Lotus Notes / Domino with
the Easysoft ODBC-ODBC Bridge (OOB). Easysoft have tested OOB with
Lotus Notes / Domino 6beta3 and the final Domino 6 although we believe
it should work with version 5 too. We tested on Linux.

We are not Lotus Notes and Domino experts and these notes only tell
you what we had to do to make ODBC work. We cannot advise on writing
Lotus Notes applications.

Easysoft strongly recommend that when installing OOB to run under
Lotus Notes that the unixODBC driver manager that comes as part of the
OOB distribution is also installed. Domino needs an ODBC driver
manager.

Domino 6
========

If you are running an early beta see below.

Domino 6 appears to be configured to use libodbc.so (the ODBC driver
manager) out of the box i.e. when you attempt to use an ODBC source
from Lotus Notes, the Domino server loads libodbc.so.

[1] Install OOB as per our normal install instructions making sure to
    install the included unixODBC driver manager.

[2] Make sure when installing the OOB client you select to install OOB
    into unixODBC.

[3] You can create your DSNs in /etc/odbc.ini. Make sure to include
    the Driver = OOB attribute setting in each DSN you define so
    unixODBC knows which driver to use. Test the DSNs locally first
    with unixODBC's isql.

[4] Use Domino's dctest to test the database connection from Domino.
    You can find more information about this in IBM's "Lotus Domino 6
    For Linux" red book.

    For our install dctest was installed in
    /opt/lotus/notes/latest/linux. You may need to make sure
    libodbc.so is available in your dynamic link path (for
    Linux/FreeBSD the OOB install will do this for you if you
    installed it as root). IBM recommend symbolically linking
    /opt/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libodbc.so to the real unixODBC's
    libodbc.so which will be in /usr/local/easysoft/unixODBC/lib for
    an OOB install.

    e.g.

    ln -s /usr/local/easysoft/unixODBC/lib/libodbc.so
          /opt/lotus/notes/latest/linux/libodbc.so

    We didn't need to do this as the OOB install for Linux adds
    /usr/local/easysoft/unixODBC/lib to /etc/ld.so.conf and runs
    /sbin/ldconfig to inform the dynamic linker of a new directory to
    look in for shared objects.

    However, when we ran dctest we did get a dynamic linker error for
    libnotes.so which appeared to be in /opt/lotus/notes/60000/linux.
    To get around this we just set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment
    variable to /opt/lotus/notes/60000/linux and exported
    LD_LIBRARY_PATH.

    e.g. LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/lotus/notes/60000/linux/
         export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

    After that dctest started fine, you can pick ODBC and enter a DSN,
    database username and database password and dctest tests the
    connection. Make sure you test the ODBC connectivity with dctest
    before moving on to Lotus Notes.

[5] Make sure the Domino DECS server is running.

    If the DECS task is not running, then the design view in Lotus
    Notes for a Data Connection will not allow the browsing of
    metadata.

    In the web admin (http://domino_server/webadmin.nsf), select Server
    then tasks. If you don't see a DECS task select, Tools, Task, Start,
    select DECS server from the list and click Start.

    This failed to start for us and an error was output in Domino
    server saying "EXTMGR_ADDINS=decsext" had to be added to the
    notes.ini file (which was in /local/notesdata for us).  Once we'd
    done this and restarted Domino the DECS task started.
   
[6] When working in the Domino Designer in Lotus Notes you should now
    be able to create a database with a Data Connection using ODBC.
    In the Data Connection dialogue select Class:RDBMS, Type:ODBC and
    type your DSN name into the Data Source field. You may also need
    to provide a database username and password in the Connectivity
    section.

Domino 6 beta 3
===============

[1] Install OOB as per our normal install instructions making sure to
    install the included unixODBC driver manager.

[2] Make sure when installing the OOB client you select to install OOB
    into unixODBC.

[3] The Lotus Notes installation appears to be already set up to
    support ODBC. All we had to do was add a symbolic link to
    the /opt/lotus/notes/latest/linux directory called libodbc.so pointing to
    the unixODBC driver manager. For the default OOB/unixODBC install
    and Lotus Notes this is:

    cd /opt/lotus/notes/latest/linux
    ln -s /usr/local/easysoft/unixODBC/lib/libodbc.so libodbc.so

[4] You can create your DSNs in /etc/odbc.ini. Make sure to include the
    Driver = OOB attribute setting in each DSN you define so unixODBC
    knows which driver to use.

Useful Links
============

http://www.notes.net technical resource for Notes and Domino
http://www.lotus.com/
