Posts Tagged ‘8.5.X’

At ILUG I attended Paul Calhoun's excellent session "Using XML and RDBMS Data Sources in XPages". The XML element of the session built upon articles Paul had contributed to The XPages Blog and the Lotus Notes and Domino Application Development Wiki. Over the last few days I've been experimenting with various methods of using XML for reporting in XPages. My particular focus has been testing performance because in my current project I'm working with a large amount of data. Firstly I tried using an XML file generated by an overnight agent and stored on the Domino server ...

As I mentioned on This Week in Lotus last week, I've been working on a submission to OpenNTF. In fact I've had it pretty much ready to go for months now, I just never got round to submitting it and the topic of OpenNTF on This Week in Lotus gave me the opportunity I needed to back myself into a corner so that I could procrastinate no longer. The project is called Audit Comments Custom Control, although the custom control is so configurable that it can capture comments from the user in a dialog and store them back to any ...

Some time ago I produced a video, on Intec's channel on youtube, showing how to use an XPage to create a live-text enabled widget. The beauty of this technique is it works in any 8.x Notes Client, it just needs a Domino 8.5.x server. I'm currently using the same technique to create a reporting sidebar panel for one of our customers. At the time I intended to add a second video showing how to create a live text recognizer so that you could right-click on a date to launch a floating window that displays documents based on that date. I was ...

This follows on from two previous articles where I outlined what became evident from the oneui themes, ways to reference server-based resources from XPages. Those articles (Part One and Part Two) concentrated on images, the most useful resource. Like many developers, at Intec we have a suite of databases with resources (some images, css files, script libraries etc) residing in a single database. When referencing resources, if you prefix the database path with "/" the output HTML is prefixed with the current database path as well. This resulted in me using SSJS to get the full host ...

When I first started on XPages last year, one of the big benefits was that virtually anything can be computed. When you do so, you get the option to use three languages: Expression Language (EL), Server Side Javascript (SSJS) or Custom. I immediately started using Server Side Javascript, but the others were a bit of a mystery. If you have experience of JSF or JSP, you'll know about Expression Language. But as a developer whose main experience was Notes Client development, and some classic Domino web development, it meant nothing to me. If I'm not the only one, hopefully this blog post will demystify ...

Over the last week I've been rather busy including some XPages functionality in an existing Domino web application, and as an example I wanted to explain why I chose XPages, some steps I took and the main challenge I encountered. XPages suited for this because: We wanted the available documents to change depending on selections, so a view panel looking to a view filtered on key worked well. We could easily allow users to process multiple documents depending on selections using viewPanel.getSelectedIds() We could easily pull in information for multiple documents from multiple databases with good performance and show it with Dojo tooltips. We ...

There has been huge discussion over the last week on the future of Domino and how to maximise the power of the platform in the eyes of senior IT executives. That XPages is and should be part of that future, I am convinced. But recent discussions I have had, comments I've seen on the blogs and recent blog posts about the role of XPages in the future also concern me. I'm not concerned that XPages is not known. I'm concerned that developers and especially senior IT executives don't get the real power of XPages. More importantly, I'm concerned that it is ...

XPages has received a lot of press over the last two years and at Intec we've already completed a number of projects using XPages, either as components of the application or the whole application. To support our customers who are investigating the benefits of XPages we have written a white paper to give a balanced assessment of the benefits and challenges of implementing XPages. The white paper has been published on Intec's website to enable customers and non-customers to justify the move to XPages and the roles IBM Business Partners like Intec can offer. It is worth emphasising that you do not necessarily ...

Following on from the tip I gave at the end of March, as well as view icons/action button icons accessible from the icons folder and images that come with the oneuiv2 themes, I recently also wanted to use images that co with the core oneui theme, that are in the java subfolder of /domino. As with the oneuiv2 images, this too requires a slightly unusual format to access those folders. This time /.ibmxspres/global/ points to the /domino/java/xsp folder, as I found when looking at the themes in the wiki template from OpenNTF. So if ...

If you're attending Lotusphere Comes to You in London (tomorrow, 13th April) or Edinburgh (Thursday, 15th April) feel free to drop by the Intec stand. Our main points of focus are version-to-version upgrade supported by our iMigrate tool and XPages. The XPages part of our rolling presentation will include a video of the dashboard that was the climax of my BLUG presentation and screenshots from some of our XPages applications, including the website building tool I developed for my personal website. The stand will be manned by myself, Tim Malone, Gary Martyn and Duncan Cooper. Pop by if you would ...

Some time ago Jo Grant posted an article on the Lotus Notes and Domino Application Development wiki with a tip about how to reference the view icon images installed with the Domino server or Notes Client. This involved using server-side javascript to manipulate the XSPUrl class, removing parameters and creating a new URL. This is a very powerful technique that I used on a number of occasions when working on my own XPages application. About a month ago I used this technique to reference images in the dominohtmloneuiv2images folder. A day or so later I started thinking about oneuiv2, recalling that ...

Earlier this month Tim Clark invited me to take part in The X Cast with himself, David Leedy of Notes in 9, and Stephan Wissel. The podcast is now available here. It was an enjoyable experience - more of a chat with friends because I've met Tim on a few occasions during my time at Intec, not least on an XPages course that he ran and I attended last year. And I've been in contact with David on a number of topics recently via email and Twitter, so it was good to finally speak to him. It's well worth listening to, ...