Question

I’m working on a way of programatically accessing a Lotus Notes database to gather information on embedded attachments of records over a given period.

My goal is to find records over a given period, then use Apache-POI to get metadata about document size, character count, etc.

The POI part works fine, and so far, I’ve been able to access the Lotus Notes records thanks to this help:

lotus notes search by date with Java api

and this answer also shows me how to download/copy the attachments:

How do I get all the attachments from a .nsf(lotus notes) file using java

from there I could use my POI code do my job and at the end, just delete the copied attachments. This approach, basically works, but I want to avoid the overhead of copying, saving and then at the end deleting my copy of these attached documents from the database.

I tried passing the result of the EmbeddedObject getSource() method as an input to my POI code and got a FileNotFoundException in the POI code that was expecting a String to make a File.

Is there a way of getting a File reference I can pass to POI, without copying and saving the attachment? Or, what I mean is, is it as simple as getting a File (+path) for the Lotus Notes EmbeddedObject attachment, and how do I do this?

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I found the answer and posted it below.

Answer 1

Answering my own question…

…here’s the solution I found a little while after posting the question above:

EmbeddedObject’s getInputStream to the rescue…

  //from the answer in the link in the question above　
  Database db = agentContext.getCurrentDatabase();
  DocumentCollection dc = db.getAllDocuments();
  Document doc = dc.getFirstDocument();
  boolean saveFlag = false;
  while (doc != null) {
    RichTextItem body = 
    (RichTextItem)doc.getFirstItem("Body");
    System.out.println(doc.getItemValueString("Subject"));
    Vector v = body.getEmbeddedObjects();
    Enumeration e = embeddedObjs.elements();
    while(e.hasMoreElements()){
        EmbeddedObject eo = (EmbeddedObject)e.nextElement();
        if(eo.getType() == EmbeddedObject.EMBED_ATTACHMENT){

    //this next line gives Apache-POI access to the InputStream

                        InputStream is = eo.getInputStream();
            POIFSFileSystem POIfs = 
                              HWPFDocument.verifyAndBuildPOIFS(is);
            POIOLE2TextExtractor extractor = 
                              ExtractorFactory.createExtractor(POIfs);
            System.out.println("extracted text: " + extractor.getText());
                        is.close();  //closing InputStream 
                     }
                     eo.recycle();  //recycling EmbeddedObject

   //thanks to rhsatrhs for the close() and recycle() tip!