Hey guys a real tough one that you guys might have had some experience in fixing for another client…
What we have is a lotus notes system that after each day generates a report (court list) into a html page and the link that has been setup doesn't need to be touched since the html page remains the same name (Our old system is frontpage).
We are hoping that something similar can be done with matrix…but currently I cannot see that this will be possible.
Have you guys had anything similar like this or perhaps a suggestion? (We can't throw away lotus notes out the window - tried that already 
)
Cheers!
MM.
Sorry, but I'm not exactly sure what you want to do. Can you give a bit more info about this please. Perhaps even how you would see it working in Matrix if such functionality existed.
Might be able to work out a solution then or suggest what would need to be done.
Sorry that was very vague wasn't it! It's monday morning and I need a coffee!
Let me start again.
With our current system (frontpage) we have a courts website that has a court listing page to show who's going to court the following day/times/yadda yadda…This is all processed within a Lotus Notes system that then gets imported into frontpage at the end of each day as a standard html page.
With the Matrix system im hoping that something similar can happen. However we cannot let just a standard html page through to our web server since it's not a true matrix asset hence it wont be able to see it (is that right?). Plus it wont have any design/permissions/metadata applied to it and so on.
Basically we are after a way that our exported data from lotus notes can be automatically imported into matrix, as a standard page (with design applied and permissions) and have any or all links to this page updated automatically (the last one we can deal with if it's not do-able).
Any suggestions?
Ah okay. There are two options here.
The first, and easiest, is to use a remote content page to nest the contents of this generated HTML page into your site. You will need to have the HTML page saved somewhere web accessible. You can use standard HTTP authentication for this page, but nothing more advanced. Basically, the ideal would be:
- have the HTML page saved to a web accessible location
- create a remote content page in Matrix and have it pull the content for that
- have Matrix use a username and password to access the page (all images would have to be tunnelled through because of the authentication - so you'd have to go easy on them because it would be fairly slow.
- use Matrix permisssions to limit access to the page for Matrix users
Obviously, if this is a public page - things get much easier. Just a note too that the remote content asset is part of the commerical module package.
The second way would be to write a script that sets the contents of a standard page in Matrix, and have this run via cron at a regular interval. This would not be too hard to develop if you knew the asset ID of the standard page. You would have to consider images though. If they change - you could be looking at a lot more complexity. If there are none - your home free. If they are the same images each time, you could upload them to matrix first and then replace absolute URLs with internal Matrix URLs.
Hope that makes some sense.
I'll give that a try Greg. Thanks for that.