Templating: Generating HTML from document collections

Sometimes it can be useful to render HTML from document collections. I believe one of the fastest ways to get values from Notes documents is using Evaluate. As a lazy person, I like to avoid writing formula code, as it's somewhat verbose compared to modern templating languages like PHP.

To avoid this, make your own template interpreter using simple formula code.

Example:

str := "Date: $#dayOfMonth#$. $?month?$.";
'"' + @ReplaceSubstring( str ; 
     "$?" : "?$" : "$#" : "#$" ;
     '" + ' : ' + "' : '" + @Text( ' : ') + "' 
) + '"'

Result: "Date: " + @Text( dayOfMonth) + ". " + month + "."

The result can be used in an evaluate statement.

A great thing about templating is that it is very maintainable/reusable. If you want to change the output, all you have to change is the template-string. To generate XML and HTML from the same collection, all you have to do is to have two different string templates. The conversion logic can be the same.

In the simple demoapp I've included, a collection of 300 documents is processed, extracting five fields. A HTML table row is generated per document. class="even"/class="odd" is added so that one can style odd/even rows. If you're somewhat familiar with LotusScript, it should not be hard to make a template-class to fit your needs.

On localhost (my laptop) it takes about 100 milliseconds to generate the HTML/write it to a PassTruHTML NotesRichTextItem.

>> Demoapp

If you want a sorted collection, you can use NotesView.AllEntries, and use NotesViewEntry.Document, to get to the document. Beware of categorized views. Test NotesViewEntry.isValid = True to be certain that the entry represents a NotesDocument. There may be other problems with using NotesViewEntry.Document as well. Proceed with caution/good error handling. :)