IBM Claims that Domino/Notes designers, starting from version 5.07a, can call SOAP based Web Service from within the Notes/Domino System. This is the claim. But if we look deeper into the implementation, it is messy and awkward.

The document can be found here:

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-soapcon/

In brief, the designer will need to download a connector called SoapConnect for LotusScript (Can be found in the link above) to help to connect to the SOAP service. Since the connector is written in Java, so even if you don’t use Java to develop Notes code, you still need to install a specific version of Java Run-time to get it work.

The sample LotusScript code is like:

1 %INCLUDE "SoapConnect"
2 Dim session As New NotesSession
3 Dim doc As NotesDocument
4 Dim myArgs(0) As Variant
5 Dim price As String
6 Set doc = session.DocumentContext
7 Dim bn As New SOAPClient("http://services.xmethods.com:80/soap/servlet/rpcrouter" )
8 myArgs( 0 ) = doc.BookNumber( 0 )
9 price = bn.invoke("urn:xmethods-BNPriceCheck", "getPrice", myArgs)

Writing the code may be simple, but setting up the run time environment can be tricky. Since Domino has made version 7 an easy platform to implement web service client and server, it is unlikely they will support version 5/6 much on Web Services any more. So I don’t expect it to be an easy task.