Quick Setup / Restore of Domino Designer

David Leedy recently posted a video on Domino Designer Tips and Tweaks, which is great. But sooner or later, you’ll move to a new PC or (god forbid!) have a serious problem with Domino Designer / Notes and really want to reinstall, to clean everything up.

Then you’ve got to remember what settings you changed and where to find them.

Except you don’t. Because Domino Designer is on Eclipse. Out of the box, Eclipse gives you the functionality to export your preferences, as Dan O’Connor mentioned in a comment on one of my previous blog posts. But like the Package Explorer in 8.5.2, it’s a bit hidden away.

The first step is to go to a non-Domino Designer perspective. I use the Java perspective. When you then open the File menu, you’ll see some additional options for Import… and Export…. Export is the one we want.

This brings up a dialog box. Under General, you want to select Preferences.

You can then select all or selected types of preferences, and choose a file location to export them to.

Then on your new install of Lotus Notes / Domino Designer you can again switch to the Java perspective or another standard Eclipse perspective and choose File – Import…. Point to the location and you can import your preferences.

Within a few minutes, all my preferences, all widgets in the relevant categories of my Widget Catalog, all Sametime communities and groups (once I had added a default community) were installed. Some settings for some widgets were downloaded, but not all. Nonetheless, it was a significant time-saver when setting up my new laptop.

It’s a shame the functionality is hidden and presumably not available for a Notes Client only install. It could save a lot of time and ensure your users love Lotus Notes.