[Disclaimer: I am new to Notes, and am picking up a project that was started by someone else, so I'm not sure if this is the best approach, and with that out of the way ....]
We have a Notes 9.0 frameset, which is being driven by a couple of databases. There are 4 parts to the frame set, with the primary one being the selection of a client. This populates the second frame with their information, and the third frame with any related clients - such as business partners, associates, etc. The fourth frame would be any and all correspondence listed with the related clients (either one or many) which has been placed into an XPage. We cannot, though, load the XPage inside the frame, having tried multiple instances of .urlopen(XPage location) and trying to open the notes:// source, http:// source, and setting the target frame in both the inline URL and as a .SetTargetFrame("frame") fashion.
Is it possible to open an XPage from with a Frameset, or is there a better approach to this?
Thanks
Integrating or embedding XPages into a traditional Domino web application is a common approach and straightforward because it's the same protocol with the same authentication. Integrating XPages into a standard Notes Client design element is challenging for a variety of reasons, not just the URL required but also because authentication to the client is via Notes ID stored on the PC, authentication to the XPage is via HTTP protocol.
If you're wishing to display a list of the correspondence in a standard Notes frameset in the Notes Client, the approach I'd take is just to point to a View or embedded view set to a single category based on the client selected. If it's a server within a decent connectivity range, view performance will be better. If it's just a list, the data should be available for a view. If it's to navigate into the documents and you want to open the correspondence in an XPage, that's achievable from a view by setting the property on the Form to open in a specific XPage.
I'm not certain, but it sounds like your choice to use the XPage was because someone had already developed an XPage of that information for web access, possibly for the external clients themselves. While re-using the previous code may seem a good approach, the challenges of integrating one technology into another (as you see) counter the benefits.
This isn't about XPages itself, it's about embedding technologies that are not really designed for that level of integration. Similarly if the correspondence was an Angular front end using REST services to pull the information from Domino, you would have similar issues integrating it into the Notes Client application (authentication, running code on the client to run code on the server to get data for the client to process - when Notes is already designed for good nrpc communication).
There may be benefits in time of migrating all of the frameset to an XPages application or a specific set of use cases that won't require users switching between browser client and Notes Client. But if that's not the approach for now, integrating the XPage into the frameset is likely to be a challenge, no least in terms of look and feel, that may not result in a good user experience.