The method described by Tony is the way I normally get relational like
behaviour from Domino. In one particular case - a system documentation
database to be precise - I wanted to be able when creating a new document to
specify both documents that it should link to and documents that should link to
it (not necessarily the same documents - though they often are -see the
Developer help db for example). This made it inevitable that you are going to
have to edit other documents one way or the other.
To me it makes much more sense for the links to be in the documents that are
linked to - that way Domino manages the referential integrity for you. You may
cop an overhead when creating a new document - or adding a link to an existing
one- but you gain that little bit of performance every time you read a document
and you can delete documents without editing other documents.
Of course if there is a security problem with editing the other documents then
that makes a difference.
In terms of performance and dblookups I suspect that there is a big difference
between using a notes client where the notes engine is separated from the
database by a network and a web client where both the engine and the DB are in
the same computer.
Finally another trick which you can try (if you have a wintel server with a lot
of grunt) is to use NotesSQL to get a relational view of your notes database
and access it from lotus script using ODBC. That way you can get the full power
of SQL, but at some cost.
The method described by Tony is the way I normally get relational like behaviour from Domino. In one particular case - a system documentation database to be precise - I wanted to be able when creating a new document to specify both documents that it should link to and documents that should link to it (not necessarily the same documents - though they often are -see the Developer help db for example). This made it inevitable that you are going to have to edit other documents one way or the other.
To me it makes much more sense for the links to be in the documents that are linked to - that way Domino manages the referential integrity for you. You may cop an overhead when creating a new document - or adding a link to an existing one- but you gain that little bit of performance every time you read a document and you can delete documents without editing other documents.
Of course if there is a security problem with editing the other documents then that makes a difference.
In terms of performance and dblookups I suspect that there is a big difference between using a notes client where the notes engine is separated from the database by a network and a web client where both the engine and the DB are in the same computer.
Finally another trick which you can try (if you have a wintel server with a lot of grunt) is to use NotesSQL to get a relational view of your notes database and access it from lotus script using ODBC. That way you can get the full power of SQL, but at some cost.