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Rapidly create and deploy powerful .NET applications that integrate with HCL Domino.

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LINQ to HCL Domino Data


LINQ offers versatile querying capabilities within the .NET Framework (v3.0+), offering a straightforward method for programmatic data access through CData ADO.NET Data Providers. In this article, we demonstrate the use of LINQ to retrieve information from the HCL Domino Data Provider.

This article illustrates using LINQ to access tables within the HCL Domino via the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for HCL Domino. To achieve this, we will use LINQ to Entity Framework, which facilitates the generation of connections and can be seamlessly employed with any CData ADO.NET Data Providers to access data through LINQ.

See the help documentation for a guide to setting up an EF 6 project to use the provider.

  1. In a new project in Visual Studio, right-click on the project and choose to add a new item. Add an ADO.NET Entity Data Model.
  2. Choose EF Designer from Database and click Next.
  3. Add a new Data Connection, and change your data source type to "CData HCL Domino Data Source".

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    Prerequisites

    The connector requires the Proton component to be installed. Normally, Proton is distributed as part of the AppDev pack. See the HCL documentation for instructions on acquiring and installing Proton or the AppDev pack.

    Once the Proton service is installed and running, you will also need to create a user account and download its Internet certificate. This certificate can be used to set the connector certificate connection properties.

    Authenticating to Domino

    • Server: The name or IP address of the server running Domino with the Proton service.
    • Port: The port number that the Proton service is listening on.
    • Database: The name of the database file, including the .nsf extension.
    • SSLClientCertType: This must match the format of the certificate file. Typically this will be either PEMKEY_FILE for .pem certificates or PFXFILE for .pfx certificates.
    • SSLClientCert: The path to the certificate file.
    • SSLServerCert: This can be set to (*) if you trust the server. This is usually the case, but if you want to perform SSL validation, you may provide a certificate or thumbprint instead. See the documentation for SSLServerCert for details.

    Additional Server Configuration

    The connector supports querying Domino views if any are defined. Before views can be queried by the connector they must be registered with the design catalog.

    Please refer to the Catalog Administration section of the AppDev pack documentation for details on how to do this.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    Server=https://domino.corp.com;Database=names.nsf;Port=3002;SSLClientCertType=PEMKEY_FILE;SSLClientCert=full_path_of_certificate.pem;SSLServerCert=*
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting DominoEntities as our entity connection in App.Config.
  6. Enter a model name and select any tables or views you would like to include in the model.

Using the entity you created, you can now perform select commands. For example:

DominoEntities context = new DominoEntities(); var bynameQuery = from byname in context.ByName select byname; foreach (var result in bynameQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Name); }

See "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation for example queries of the supported LINQ.