Friday, September 19, 2008

Processing documents by category in categorized views

Problem: How to process documents in a category (categorized view) in a simple way?

This is a problem I've heard a couple of times at work from the Notes-guys (I'm a Domino/Web-guy). I've tried a couple of approaches/googled, but found nothing. Therefore I archived this problem in my "experiment ideas"-folder.

Today I had a little time to play around, and found a very simple solution.

When you click an item in a view, a couple of properties is set in the NotesUIView. CaretNodeId points to the NoteId of the document that is selected. The gem is that when you click a category, an "invalid" NoteId is set. If you can't get a document from from the db using that NoteId, the item clicked is probably a category.

Now you know the user clicked a category.

Combining the ViewSelection-formula of the view, and the Formula-property of the first column (the column has to point to one field in the document for this to work), you have a valid search-formula for db.search.

Now you know which documents the user want.

Of course, the user don't want to modify documents by category each time they click the category. Add a button that sets an environment variable, and test for the value of that variable in the onSelect-event in the view. If you want to make available several types of action on the documents, use more values.

Now you know when/how the user wants to modify the documents

Problem solved..? :)

As always, blogposts like this are useless without a simple demoapp..
>> DemoApp

If you like/dislike this workaround/hack, please leave a comment.

Update: The onselect event is new in Notes 8. So if you're running on older versions, I guess there's no simple solution. Thanks to Theo for giving me a heads up!

2 comments:

Theo Heselmans (Xceed) said...

Interesting. Took me some time to see it only worked in 8, as it uses 'onselect'.
What I did learn also is 'caretcategory'. Never noticed this property before. Could be useful (and was available since R5) !
Tx Tommy.

Tommy Valand said...

I didn't know that (didn't check the docs).

I'll update the post, so that others won't get confused. Thanks for letting me know!