Genii Weblog

Driving a RESTful interchange

Wed 29 Aug 2018, 10:31 AM



by Ben Langhinrichs
Over the past few years, we have expanded our offerings at Genii to allow more exchanging of data. To be honest, most of it has been outgoing, whether migrating Notes data to SharePoint or many other systems, or simply rendering Notes information to be more consumable on the web. We have added support for CSV to allow large batch exports, but also JSON to allow more RESTful exchanges. Rich text is included, of course, but much of the focus is on powerful extraction of data of all sorts.

It is with that latter goal in mind that I have been working with a few different systems including SharePoint, Confluence, and Salesforce. But times are changing. There are many positive signs out of IBM and HCL about the soon-to-arrive Notes/Domino 10, as well as future, even more ambitious plans for Notes/Domino 11. With that in mind, I am focusing a little more energy on drawing date into Notes/Domino.

One example of the work I have been doing is between Notes/Domino and Salesforce, because the latter has grown by leaps and bounds in popularity. But most companies don't get to choose either Notes/Domino OR Salesforce. Instead, they are left with Notes/Domino AND Saleforce. With that in mind, I am working on how to use a REST interface as well as events in Notes/Domino and the Streaming API in Salesforce to move data back and forth, either keeping it in sync or storing the appropriate pieces of one system in the other as needed. Notes/Domino has its advantages, Salesforce has different ones. Companies which can easily share and exchange information between them can pick and choose where an application or data resides, which may not be the same place it is collected.

Getting all of that in place will take a while, and I hope to document some of the steps. Obviously, we would welcome any companies that want to use our products now to move data, but we will also try to be transparent about the advances we make. As a simple example of how extensive this can be, I show here some fields including a Notes rich text field moved to a Salesforce Contact with a rich text area field.

The following is after the POST to Salesforce (red arrows show updated fields).

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And this is the source in Notes/Domino (red arrows show fields to use for REST).

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So far, it is pretty good, but we intend to improve it. If you would like to be part of a test with some of your data, contact me and we'll work it out.

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