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Get the Report →Analyze HCL Domino Data in R
Create data visualizations and use high-performance statistical functions to analyze HCL Domino data in Microsoft R Open.
Access HCL Domino data with pure R script and standard SQL. You can use the CData ODBC Driver for HCL Domino and the RODBC package to work with remote HCL Domino data in R. By using the CData Driver, you are leveraging a driver written for industry-proven standards to access your data in the popular, open-source R language. This article shows how to use the driver to execute SQL queries to HCL Domino data and visualize HCL Domino data in R.
Install R
You can complement the driver's performance gains from multi-threading and managed code by running the multithreaded Microsoft R Open or by running R linked with the BLAS/LAPACK libraries. This article uses Microsoft R Open (MRO).
Connect to HCL Domino as an ODBC Data Source
Information for connecting to HCL Domino follows, along with different instructions for configuring a DSN in Windows and Linux environments.
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.
When you configure the DSN, you may also want to set the Max Rows connection property. This will limit the number of rows returned, which is especially helpful for improving performance when designing reports and visualizations.
Windows
If you have not already, first specify connection properties in an ODBC DSN (data source name). This is the last step of the driver installation. You can use the Microsoft ODBC Data Source Administrator to create and configure ODBC DSNs.
Linux
If you are installing the CData ODBC Driver for HCL Domino in a Linux environment, the driver installation predefines a system DSN. You can modify the DSN by editing the system data sources file (/etc/odbc.ini) and defining the required connection properties.
/etc/odbc.ini
[CData Domino Source]
Driver = CData ODBC Driver for HCL Domino
Description = My Description
Server = https://domino.corp.com
Database = names.nsf
Port = 3002
SSLClientCertType = PEMKEY_FILE
SSLClientCert = full_path_of_certificate.pem
SSLServerCert = *
For specific information on using these configuration files, please refer to the help documentation (installed and found online).
Load the RODBC Package
To use the driver, download the RODBC package. In RStudio, click Tools -> Install Packages and enter RODBC in the Packages box.
After installing the RODBC package, the following line loads the package:
library(RODBC)
Note: This article uses RODBC version 1.3-12. Using Microsoft R Open, you can test with the same version, using the checkpoint capabilities of Microsoft's MRAN repository. The checkpoint command enables you to install packages from a snapshot of the CRAN repository, hosted on the MRAN repository. The snapshot taken Jan. 1, 2016 contains version 1.3-12.
library(checkpoint)
checkpoint("2016-01-01")
Connect to HCL Domino Data as an ODBC Data Source
You can connect to a DSN in R with the following line:
conn <- odbcConnect("CData Domino Source")
Schema Discovery
The driver models HCL Domino APIs as relational tables, views, and stored procedures. Use the following line to retrieve the list of tables:
sqlTables(conn)
Execute SQL Queries
Use the sqlQuery function to execute any SQL query supported by the HCL Domino API.
byname <- sqlQuery(conn, "SELECT Name, Address FROM ByName WHERE City = 'Miami'", believeNRows=FALSE, rows_at_time=1)
You can view the results in a data viewer window with the following command:
View(byname)
Plot HCL Domino Data
You can now analyze HCL Domino data with any of the data visualization packages available in the CRAN repository. You can create simple bar plots with the built-in bar plot function:
par(las=2,ps=10,mar=c(5,15,4,2))
barplot(byname$Address, main="HCL Domino ByName", names.arg = byname$Name, horiz=TRUE)