Accessing mainframe / prepopulating

Question

Hi, new to livecycle, question if I may:
I am looking to find an example that I can model in our form. Our form needs to take a "last name" string, for example, and pass that string to a mainframe where our customer data resides. The mainframe should return all of the customers with that last name into a "search" fragment where the client can scroll through 1 or more matches. The client then will select a customer, whose account message will get prepoluated into certain fields.
I would like to know if there are tutorials or samples from someone who has done this, if there are any. I am thinking that perhaps a web service would need to be invoked? However we may have to depoist the request into MQSeries and retrieve the response. So we are unsure if a soap request is really what's needed in this case or not.
Thanks to all you experts that can help out a newbie ;-)

Answer 1

You will need a program that sits in between the MF and the form. This program will communicate with the MF on our behalf. Typically this is exposed to the form as a Web Service call but speaks whatever the MF needs to do the job (JDBC, MQ Series, LDAP ....this will depend on what the application on the mainframe supports). The form woudl make the call to the intermediate program then teh query woudl be formatted for the call to the MF, then the results would be returned and packaged up to send to the form. I have done this numerous times using LiveCycle Server but you do not have to use that to do the trick (although if you have it the creation of the program is very easy). Typically the people who own the data (MF asset) are the ones who woudl provide or be responsible for that program.