Workaround: ViewRefreshFields does not trigger WQO

A form I'm working on gets a combobox (or select list, if you prefer) generated by a WebQueryOpen agent. The content of the combobox is generated on the basis of another field.

I use one combobox to select a db, then the second shows documents in the selected db.

When I select a db, I want to generate the select list with documents in the selected db. I first considered running ViewRefreshFields, but WQO-agents don't get triggered by this.

It seems that running agents with the ToolsRunMacro @Command keeps the form as it was before the running of the agent.

The workaround, then, is quite simple. Add a hidden button (style="display:none") on the form. OnClick on the button, run the agent generating HTML (and ViewRefreshFields, if you need to refresh the form). Onchange in the db-combobox, click the button.

document.getElementById('your-id-in-the-button').click()

If you've used a similar approach, and found weaknesses with it, please let me know in a comment.

Fun with the WebBrowser Control pt 3

I've come a little farther in my experimentation.

Today's flash show offline DHTML. The flash doesn't do the FX justice btw. When I'm done tinkering, you'll get to see the real deal.




I put the mootools framework JS inside a RichText-item on a document. Fetch the js as a string. Write the string and some HTML to the WebBrowser-control. Hey Presto! Offline DHTML.

My brain is fried right now, so no more programming today.. :)

Fun with the WebBrowser Control pt 2

Getting to know the object more and more.

Today's flash shows capturing events from the browser-control, and picking values from the document inside the control.



This resource from Microsoft has helped me along somewhat. Only a fraction of the methods/events/properties documented is available in Notes though.

The demoapp is still not ready, as I'm still not finished investigating possibilities.. :)

Getting relative dbpath on localhost

Update, 25.08.08: It appears I'm not the only one struggling with this issue. Jack Ratcliff had a similar issue. The difference being that he didn't have a document to process.

Since all databases are required to have one view, and all design-elements basically are NotesDocuments, it's easy to rewrite the code to work without needing a "real document".

Function WebFilePath( db As NotesDatabase ) As String
 Dim view As NotesView
 Set view  = db.Views(0)
 
 Dim viewDoc As NotesDocument
 Set viewDoc = db.GetDocumentByUNID( view.UniversalID )
 
 WebFilePath = Join( Evaluate( |@WebDbName|, viewDoc ) ) 
End Function

If for some reason you're not working in a HTTP-environment, use this instead of @WebDbName:
@ReplaceSubstring( @DbName[2] ; "\\" ; "/" )

--

Today, I had to make a multi-db search agent for web localhost compatible. When printing the path to the db, I had used NotesDatabase.FilePath. The problem with this is that it returns the filesystem path to the db when running locally. E.g. c:\lotus\notes\data\db.nsf

I could use NotesDatabase.ReplicaID, but I prefer somewhat readable URLs.

My solution was using evaluate @DbName[2] (the path to the database), with a document from the db I was currently processing. Without the document as second argument, evaluate would return the path to the search database.

Function printPath(resultDoc As NotesDocument) As String
 Dim dbpath As String
 dbpath = Join( Evaluate( |
@ReplaceSubstring(@DbName[2];"\\";"/")|,resultDoc))
 
 printPath= "/" + dbpath + "/0/" + resultDoc .UniversalID
End Function

Fun with the WebBrowser control

I'm messing around with the WebBrowser Control again.. :)

I planned on getting a demoapp together today, but I had to find a workaround for showing/hiding the layer holding the webbrowser, and that took most of my time. Hide-when doesn't work properly with the WebBrowser-object.

At least I want to show some fruits of my labor. A small flash animation showing scripting between Notes and the control/putting the WebBrowser control inside a layer.




The promt/messagebox in the demo are Notes'. You can tell from how they look, compared to the browser's alert/prompt.

I'll probably post a demoapp/more info when I have something more useful..

Simple trick to add PNGs as image resource

In the Open-dialog you get when you click New Image Resource, type *.png and press enter. Then you filter the "view" so that only PNG images show. You can use this trick to add other file-types as well.

I've used this trick in other applications for years, and thought it was common knowledge. A colleague of mine wasn't aware of this the other day, so I thought I should share it with you as well.

I don't know if this works on Mac/in Linux as I'm not familiar with their file system browsers.