10.4 Synchronizing Activities To-Do's with Notes Calendar

Activies offers a great feature of to-do to help remind the tasks assigned to you. But some uses are already very used to leveraging Notes calendar to track there to-do tasks. It will be very convenient for the user to track their Activities to-dos in their Notes Calendar. This section will show you how to synchronize Activities to-do list with Notes Calendar.

Retrieving Activities to-do list from Activites via Lotus Connections API

Before we start writing code to retrieve the to-do list from Activities, we'd better first make a data model for the Activities to-do in order to hold the data for future use (add those TODOs to Notes Calendar). Here we don't need all of the information retrieved from Activities to-do entry. What we need is the title, startDate, dueDate, and content.

Listing 1. Activities to-do data model

public class ActivitiesTodo {
	private String title;
	private String startDate;
	private String dueDate;
	private String content;
	public ActivitiesTodo(String title, String author, String assignedTo, String dueDate, String content) {
		this.title = title;
		this.author = author;
		this.assignedTo = assignedTo;
		this.dueDate = dueDate;
		this.content= content;
	}
	public String getTitle() {
		return title;
	}
	public void setTitle(String title) {
		this.title = title;
	}
	......
}

Following code is used to retrieve all the to-do's which are assigned to you.

For more detail about how to assemble the URL used to retrive Activities to-do list, please refer to the Lotus Connections 2 Information Center.

Listing 2. Retriving the to-do list assigned to you

Abdera abdera = new Abdera();
Parser parser = abdera.getParser();
URL api_url = new URL("http://connections.demoibm.com/activities/service/atom/todos?assignedto=PBrown@demoibm.com");

 Using your Activities login ID and password to pass authentication
HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) api_url.openConnection();
String encoding = new sun.misc.BASE64Encoder().encode(("PBrown@demoibm.com" + ":" + "
  techw0rks").getBytes());
connection.setRequestProperty("Authorization", "Basic " + encoding);

Document document = parser.parse(connection.getInputStre am());
Feed feed = document.getRoot();

XPath xpath = abdera.getXPath();
List entries = feed.getEntries();
List todoList = new ArrayList();
for (Entry entry : entries) {
	String title = xpath.valueOf("a:title", entry);
	String startDate = xpath.valueOf("a:published", entry);
	String dueDate = xpath.valueOf("snx:duedate", entry, feed.getNamespaces());
        String content = xpath.valueOf("a:content", entry);
	todoList.add(new ActivitiesTodo(title, startDate, dueDate, content));
}