HCL Notes and Domino wiki: App dev: Creating an IBM Rational Team Concert work item from an IBM Lotus Notes database

Creating an IBM Rational Team Concert work item from an IBM Lotus Notes database

Added by ~Fred Cistumipulings | Edited by ~Fred Cistumipulings on June 27, 2011 | Version 3

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This article describes the integration of an IBM® Lotus® Notes® database with an IBM Rational® Team Concert (RTC) Server, in which a JavaTM agent created in a Notes environment or database communicates with the RTC Server through the standard RTC API.

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1 Introduction
2 Architecture
3 Configuring
4 Detailed steps
5 Conclusion
6 Resources
7 About the author

Introduction

This article provides an overview of how to create a Rational Team Concert (RTC) work item from a Lotus Notes database.

It is assumed that your environment includes the following:

Rational Team Concert Server (2.0.0.2 iFix 3)
Lotus Notes Client (8.5.1 or later)

Architecture

Figure 1 is a schematic of the basic architecture, showing the use of the standard RTC API for communication between Lotus Notes and Rational Team Concert.

Figure 1. Basic architecture of the environment

Configuring

To configure our environment, follow these steps:

1. Add the following two lines in java.policy of Lotus Notes (at end of default permissions, as shown):

folder Notes\jvm\lib\security\java.policy

permission java.util.logging.LoggingPermission "control";
permission java.lang.RuntimePermission "setContextClassLoader";

2. Restart the Notes client.

3. Unzip the .jar files into folder, Notes\jvm\lib\ext (refer to the attachment, “JazzPlainJavaClient-2.0.0.2iFix3.zip”), and restart the Notes client.

4. Find the sample Notes database with source in the attachment, “create_rtc_wi.nsf”.

Detailed steps

The attached Notes database (.nsf) file contains the source with the API to connect to the RTC Server and create work item.

1. Open the database in the Notes client and click the Create Notes Data Document button (see figure 2).

Figure 2. Create Notes Data Document button

2. This action opens “frmNotesData” (see figure 3). Fill in the fields Project Area, Team Area, Summary, Type of Task, Description, and Due Date fields.

3. Click the Create RTC Work Item button.

Figure 3. frmNotesData

4. This opens the form “frmuserdetails”. Enter the User name, password and the RTC server URL (see figure 4).

Figure 4. frmuserdetails

5. When you click OK, the agent “create_rtc_wi” is triggered, and the data is posted on the respective RTC Server. This action take some time as the component tries to establish the connection to RTC Server.

If the action fails, then the logs are stored in the Status / Error Message field (see figure 5). Note that you must click the Refresh button to the see the log for either the success or failure case.

Figure 5. Status / Error Message field

The same attribute values can be seen in the RTC work item, as shown in figure 6.

Figure 6. RTC Work item

Conclusion

In this article you've learned about the API to connect and communicate with an RTC Server from a Lotus Notes environment.

Resources

RTC API from jazz.net site:
https://jazz.net/downloads/rational-team-concert/releases/2.0.0.2iFix6?p=allDownloads#standard

developerWorks Lotus and Domino product page:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/products/notesdomino/

IBM Rational software page:
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/rational/?lnk=mhpr

About the author

Vijayakumar Ramakrishnan joined IBM in 2007 and is currently the Application Architect of the IBM Global Financing (IGF) Notes Development Team that develops/maintains solutions for IGF Lease Management System (LMS) Notes (Australia / New Zealand).