The COM Toolkit

This cool toolkit enables Visual Basic, VBScript or any so-called COM-enabled application to access the Notes data through the Domino Object Model. In essence, this means that your VB programs and alike can access Notes data with the same easy as any other database on the Windows platform. Many a developer has started their programming career as VB programmers. And it's not for a small reason! The VB development tools can create state-of-the-art applications just like any development platform.

Now you have the possibility to include Notes data in these applications.

But wait, theres more! The COM toolkit can also be utilized from a C or C++ application. Since the COM toolkit can exist alongside the Notes C and C++ API at the same time (yes, that right; all three APIs live and kickin' at the same time!), you can utilize features found only in the COM library.

One of the classic examples of COM toolkit use is the "Need to bypass the password dialog"-feature in your application. In the sample below

The "Lotus Notes Password" dialog box from List Fields. By using such a dialog, the user can select to store the password on his or her system to avoid repetitive password dialogs from Lotus Notes itself.

The API world gives you a couple of another ways to avoid the password dialogs. Those are;

1. Via the Extension Manager hook library. This implies hooking of the correct function calls from Notes, and supply your own password just before Notes completes the logon. This is the recommended way to achieve "non password dialog"-applications in Notes
2. An old hack is to use the VIM toolkit (see below) to establish the session with a specified password. However, this used to work for Release 3 and 4 of Lotus Notes, and to be frank; I have not tested this technique after release 4! But it might work!