In this article I will begin to introduce IBM Social Business Toolkit (SBT), provide links on how to get it set up, talk briefly about how it works and then provide my first demo on how to get “My Files”.

The whole of this series will be based on “Smart cloud (now Connections Cloud)” as opposed to Connections on premises. This should not however really affect too much other than how you make the initial connection. After that the API is pretty much the same (for my purposes anyway).

Thank you Kathy Brown

Setting up SBT is not the easiest thing to do – nothing IBM ever is. But I owe a huge thank you to Kathy who did the bulk of the hard work on this. Setting this up locally for me was pretty simple once she knew how. Part of the reason for me writing it down as I said before is self documentation ‘cos I know I will forget 🙂

IBM SBT

Here are some links on how to set it up and configure it – you will have to install it on your server as well as in your Domino Designer.

• IBM SBT on OpenNTF
  • Here you will find a video on the basics of the SBT
  • You will also find the latest releases of the code
• IBM SBT on GitHub
  • The latest code releases (without being in the official release yet)
• IBMSBT tag on Stack Overflow
  • IBM are actively supporting answering questions through here
• Getting Started as a Java developer with Connections
  • This will however show you how to set this up on tomcat locally not on an XPages server
• App Dev for IBM Connections Cloud
  • Masses of links and help and API references and stuff !
• SBT Playground on IBM greenhouse
  • Where I will steal a lot of example code from
• Dave Leedy’s Social Enabler Cheatsheet

Setting up on Domino Designer 

Download the latest code from OpenNTF (I used this one). Unzip the file locally and within there you will find the following folder

• sbtsdk/redist/domino/

Within there you will find the com.ibm.sbt.domino.updatesite-1.0.3.20140723-1200.zip!. That is the file you need to reference when you install the feature into Domino Designer. (If you want to run the playground locally you will also need to install from the playground updatesite)

Setting up the server

Within the zip file references above you will find the features and plugins folders.

Copy them and paste them onto your server in the following directory. The features and folders for the server are listed there.

DominoIstallPath\data\domino\workspace\applications\eclipse

I am sure there is a better “updatesite” way of doing it, but this worked for me *shrugs*

The XPagesSBT.nsf

The database within the zip file gives you some examples of how to work with the API and provides links and examples for the JavaScript API, Java API, XPages snippets and other examples. I am not going to use those examples. There is some cool out of the box feature but

• The JavaScript API is far from complete (which is why I am learning Java)
• The Java examples are not complete (which is why I am doing this from scratch)
• The XPages examples and snippets are very “XPagey” and I would rather do it myself

The faces-config.xml

Now this is the one useful thing you should get from the XPagesSBT.nsf because it contains all the managed beans used by the SBT to connect to Connections Cloud (and Facebook and Twitter and others). In there you will find examples for connecting to smartcloud and connections. You will need these in your quest to create an SBT application.

You will find this file through the Package Explorer, in the WEB-INF folder

Setting up Connections OAuth app

• http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/appdevwiki.nsf/dx/Getting_Started_with_IBM_Connections_API_via_OAuth
  • ew 😦

Setting up a Smart (Connections) Cloud “App” for OAuth

Within Connections Cloud, not much less ew, but at least all browser based. This is how to register your app and get the OAuth tokens.

 

 

 

 

In the next article we will actually create our first example to Authorize and pull personal data from Connections Cloud.