Towards the end of last year I was on a customer site where a user was scrolling through a view to find entries that were towards the bottom. Needless to say I pointed out that by starting to type, you could jump down to the entries beginning with those letters. Over the next few days I pointed out a number of additional usability tips. It occurred to me that many users may receive minimal training on Notes applications. Frustrations probably often come from old user interfaces on applications developed many years ago but never updated or lack of knowledge of ...
In a recent Notes Client development I had the need to programmatically detach images inserted into a Notes Document. The images also needed to be visible in the Notes Client rather than added as attachments. But an image pasted into a Rich Text field is not accessible via NotesRichTextItem.EmbeddedObjects. There was also the challenge that for some configuration documents I needed to use specific images for specific purposes, but I didn't know in advance the programmatic name of the attachment. What seemed to be the obvious solution was Rich Text Lite fields set to only allow Thumbnails. Despite the name, thumbnails ...
This blog post isn't specific to XPages and may be something many developers are aware of. But it took me many years of Notes development to learn this little bit of information that can quickly help troubleshoot data issues with Notes documents. It's still relevant in the world of XPages and well worth taking into consideration if you're manipulating field values via managed beans. And it may be something XPages developers who have come from a non-Domino background may not be aware of. It's something that can be very useful for database support, as I was reminded last week. Notes documents ...
This morning I came across a tweet from Ed Brill about Symphony / Open Office with a link to this article about Apache OpenOffice IBM Edition. The article is positive reinforcing that although Symphony 3.0.1 is likely to be the last release, IBM's commitment to OpenOffice continues (as those of us in the yellow bubble have known for a while) both by feeding Symphony code back into the OpenOffice project and in the release of IBM Docs, announced last week at Lotusphere. But one point stood out for me in the article. Apache OpenOffice and the IBM Edition will not ...
While at EntwicklerCamp a couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to share a couple of usability enhancements which seem to have slipped under the radar of some developers. The first is a useful resource for developers using XPages. As many will know, SVN is possible within Domino Designer now and from all the demos recently it is being made easier for 8.5.3. But SVN only allows you to control versions of design elements checked in. I for one have often been in the situation where I am frustratedly trying to get some code working and end up screwing my ...
Exporting to CSV and Multi-Value Fields
This morning I picked up a support query from a customer who was confused by the behaviour of an export. My customer was exporting a view to a csv file for import into a third-party application. Although I've written agents to import to and from text files with a specified delimiter, this was just using the normal Notes Client export functionality from File - Export. However, the output from the view in question was rather strange. One column showed a multi-value field, but with no specified separator, so the view column was: Value1,Value2,Value3 But only the first two values were ...
Autosave database size
Our Domino Administrator noticed today that the as_XXXXX.nsf database was extremely large. This is the database used to store documents and emails if autosave is turned on. Autosave was a new option with R7, if my memory is correct, and although I've never used it for a Form in a database (most forms tend to be quite small), I've found it invaluable on a number of occasions for emails and Symphony documents. Being curious I also had a look at my own as_pwithers.nsf database. It was nearly 400Mb. When I opened the database there were no documents in any of the views, which ...
