Posts Tagged ‘Lotus’

Today myself and the other IBM Champions were notified of the 2011 IBM Technology Trends Survey. To support the survey, 100 people who respond will receive a gift certificate for $20. Not bad for 10-15 minutes of your time. Why do I think this is important? I'm sure the results will get picked up again by analysts, so it's an opportunity to have input into information that senior IT professionals may be using to base strategy decisions. Below is a brief description that Joyce Davis sent out: "What is the survey? In the 2010 IBM Tech Trends Survey, more than 50% of the respondents told ...

I've learnt a lot over the years, but occasionally I'm reminded of reusable bits of code I created years ago and am still using today. Deletion logging is an example of that. Before I joined Intec I created a lotusscript library with a couple of function to track attempted deletions, either via a log or an email to an administrator. Time and again it's helped me out, whether to confirm user error or to prove a document must still be in the database somewhere. It's been very reliable and I'm still using it virtually unchanged, although I have considered convering ...

It's been a while since I last wrote anything on dojox charting, but there is always more. Anyone who was at BLUG or has downloaded the sample database I created for that session will have seen that I extended dojox charting to allow the user to click on a pie chart and navigate through the database to specific documents. For me, this is the real power of XPages, using repeat controls to produce innovative and dynamic methods of navigation. Outlines or menus are okay, but we can do so much more. Dashboards look nice, but allow your users to ...

Yesterday Chris Toohey provided one of his typically insightful articles about the change of nomenclature with Domino R8, from database to application. To paraphrase the article, it was a challenge to developers to think before hitting Ctrl + N, that a developer's toolkit should contain reusable modules that are extended and assembled into an application. In my opinion, IBM have made large strides towards encouraging developers to do so not just by a change of terminology but through the two major additions with R8. First came composite applications. Now first let me admit that I've yet to use composite applications in ...

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 ...

Today I picked up a query on the Notes and Domino 8.5 forum asking how to launch the first attachment on a document from a view panel in XPages. I had done something similar for BLUG in terms of adding content to a view panel and showing a thumbnail picture stored in a rich text field. I've done something similar in classic web development, using @AttachmentNames in a view and a quick look at the help confirmed that @AttachmentNames is one of the @Formulas available in XPages. I instantly offered a suggestion that included the following server-side javascript code to ...

So today was my debut as a speaker at a LUG, at BLUG at the IBM Forum in Brussels. My session title was "XPages from a Different 'View'-point", basically getting the most from View Controls, Data Tables and most of all Repeat Controls. Basically I was showcasing various techniques to help widen horizons for displaying, editing and navigating through data - some from various blogs, some that I've learned and developed myself (and will be blogging or sharing elsewhere in the near future). Thanks to Theo for accepting my abstract, it's been a hectic month putting my presentation together, and ...

Next week I'll be speaking at BLUG. I've got quite a bit of learning that has come out of my presentation which I will be disseminating in due course, including another article in the Dojox Charting Tutorial that will take charts to the next level and help produce a powerful, drillable dashboard. But there are also some bits of learning that I just won't have the time to include in my presentation, as well as some that I will be skipping over. When I first started working with XPages there were a number of concepts that, as someone who ...

After using XPages for some time, I am currently coding an interface for 7.0.x Notes Client to allow users to review and update multiple documents at once. Not surprisingly, I'm getting a bit frustrated at how easy it would be in XPages. Just add a repeat control, define the data, add one set of controls, and I'd be done. But in 7.0.x Notes Client it's not so easy, though I'm sure lots of you have done it before. I'm creating a table, with a certain number of rows. The users need to see all rows at once, so I can't set ...

Here's a nice little tip if you want to check the output from an @Formula. I don't think it's documented anywhere, but I've been using it since R5 (I think) and it's come in quite useful. I'm sure that when I tried it in the new Eclipse client in R8, it didn't work. But I happened to try it yesterday in the 8.5.1 client, and it does work again. All you need is a text field, your @Formula and two fingers. I usually create a new memo and use the Subject field. Type or paste your formula into the text field, like ...

Hot on the heels of attending a very interesting presentation skills seminar, I got notification over the weekend that I had been accepted to speak at BLUG (Belux Lotus User Group) on 30th March. My session is entitled XPages From A Different "View"-point and here's the abstract: With repeat controls and data tables you can really enhance the user experience. Join me as I demystify them and show you techniques to take your views to the next level, both in presenting and editing view data. Get down and dirty in the source panel with pagers, filtering views, search panels, document ...

At the moment I'm reviewing some older databases to look for performance improvements. Some leap from the screen, like changing GetNthDocument for GetFirstDocument and GetNextDocument in script, removing unnecessary sorting, removing private views that had been created for support purposes. Much of what I've been looking at is based on the whitepaper article by Andre Guirard which, if you've never come across it, is a must read. At the moment I'm going through views and comparing the view to the view index size on live. This is throwing up some interesting information. For example, I have one view that ...

One of my standard interview questions is to pose a challenging real-life scenario I encountered a few years ago. The scenario posed is of a suite a databases developed for use on Notes Clients minimum release of 6.5.x and maximum release of 7.0.2. The requirement is for users to open a document in database A and view and access a small number of related documents in databases B and C. The related documents in databases B and C are restricted with reader access, and the solution needs to respect those security constraints. The additional challenge is that the solution needs ...

Not for the first time I came across something I had not been aware of before, and then had a second occurrence within a week. It's something I'll bear in mind for the future and, as such, I think it's worth sharing. The first occurrence was last week. I've long held it true that if you want an application broken, give it to end users - sooner or later they will break it in a way you hadn't even envisaged. So I should not have been surprised when I deployed a new XPages application for UAT and the testers highlighted an ...

A few weeks ago one of my colleagues was having a problem with the Date Time Picker control in an XPage. You can see an example here. Whenever he clicked the calendar icon, the form refreshed immediately, before a value could be selected. After further investigation, this was happening only on Internet Explorer, but not in the Notes Client or Firefox. I had been working on the dojox charts series, so the immediate thought was to enable compatibility mode in Internet Explorer. I was not too surprised when this resolved the problem. To make a more robust solution, as ...