I came across a tweet yesterday evening about content assist for LotusScript in Domino Designer being slow. I committed the cardinal sin of assuming that the person in question already knew of the setting in the Preferences. Just in case the information, and more, is of use to anyone else – and because the Full Client Preferences are so voluminous it would take an aeon to investigate fully – here are a few settings/shortcuts.
On the Domino Designer – LotusScript Editor tab there is a Code Assistance section. I find the hover help extremely useful, especially because you can click into the window and follow the links to examples, parent categories etc. Never again do I need to open the Help file to find whether I need to code for “myDb is Nothing” or “myDb.IsOpen” when I’m creating a new NotesDatabase object. Now I can find in which script library my user-defined subs and functions are stored, see the function return value type, see the parameter types, and see any comments I’ve added – all by just hovering on the sub/function name.
I would also recommend changing the content assist auto activation delay can be reduced from the default 200 ms, unless you have something better to do while waiting for the content assist to kick in! But if the content assist still doesn’t kick in quick enough for you or (like me) you start typing, make a mistake and have to press delete, you can use Ctrl + Space to re-start the content assist from the point the cursor has reached. So there’s no excuse for typing the whole of NotesViewEntryCollection unless you really want to.
And the same content assist auto activation delay setting is available for Javascript and Java under those tabs. I don’t do any Java coding, but for Javascript (client-side and server-side) CTRL + Space also re-starts the content assist.
Similarly, when error messages have identified an error on e.g. line 203, over the years we’ve had to put up with looking in the bottom right-hand corner of the Designer Client and keep clicking down the page to try to locate which is line 203. No more! If you haven’t already, open the new LotusScript Editor, find some code, right-click in the the left-hand margin of your code and you’ll see an option for showing Line Numbers.
Select it, and line numbers will be shown, so you can immediately go to the right line. However, a word of warning: make sure you’ve got the right sub or function selected, not the top level Script Library or Agent. If youvhe top level selected, the line numbering is for the whole code, so will not correspond to your error line number.
And the same functionality also works for Javascript and Server-Side Javascript Script Libraries, to show line numbers in those too. Plus there is an additional setting to show Quick Differences.
One of the frustrations of the new LotusScript Editor has been that it doesn’t auto-indent code as the old editor does in e.g. forms and views. A nifty little shortcut though to avoid you having to manually indent all the lines (as you do in the javascript editor for e.g. forms and views) is to use select all or part of the lines you need to fix the indentation of and press Ctrl + i. Et Voila, your code is auto-indented. Unfortunately the same shortcut doesn’t work for the Javascript editor, and it means you have to remember a different shortcut than for auto-formatting XPages source code (that one is Ctrl + Shift + f), but we need something to do with the time saved by content assist, content assist for custom classes, and hover help!
Personally I do not mind the editor not performing the auto indent for me. For what its worth, if after the line containing for example, the IF .. Then, you indent then the subsequent lines will be indented.