In case you missed it in Yellowcast, episode five. There's an undocumented feature in Lotus Domino that lets you pull HTML from a RichText field. This is a very useful feature for me at least.
Example url: http://www.notes.net/secrets/undocumented.nsf/documentation/easteregg?OpenField
I believe Carl Tyler was one of the first to blog about this.
Why not document such a great feature? Why, IBM?!
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
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!
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!
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Json-search on Domino views
Domino (at least pre 8.5) doesn't let you use $$SearchTemplate forms as anything other than vanilla Domino-generated html forms.
This makes it somewhat difficult to search/getting Json-data in return.
The simplest workaround I've found is to make a view with one column. The data is formatted as Json, with a trailing comma. In the search-template, I wrap the $$ViewBody-field like this:
<div id="result">[|$$ViewBody-field|,""]</div>
When I want to search, I use a temporary iframe, added to the DOM using Javascript. To make it as simple as possible, browser compatibility-wise (events), I add a the iframe inside a temporary div using innerHTML. The iframe has an onload-event. When that triggers, I know that the Json is loaded.
I'm terrible at explaining code (terrible at explaining anything), so I've made a simple demo-app you can try. Remember to create a full-text index on the demo-db before trying it out.
Flash demonstration of the app (I parse the Json to HTML):
>> Demoapp
The app is tested, and works in Opera 9.5, FF3 and IE7 on Vista x64.
This makes it somewhat difficult to search/getting Json-data in return.
The simplest workaround I've found is to make a view with one column. The data is formatted as Json, with a trailing comma. In the search-template, I wrap the $$ViewBody-field like this:
<div id="result">[|$$ViewBody-field|,""]</div>
When I want to search, I use a temporary iframe, added to the DOM using Javascript. To make it as simple as possible, browser compatibility-wise (events), I add a the iframe inside a temporary div using innerHTML. The iframe has an onload-event. When that triggers, I know that the Json is loaded.
I'm terrible at explaining code (terrible at explaining anything), so I've made a simple demo-app you can try. Remember to create a full-text index on the demo-db before trying it out.
Flash demonstration of the app (I parse the Json to HTML):
>> Demoapp
The app is tested, and works in Opera 9.5, FF3 and IE7 on Vista x64.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Fun with the WebBrowserControl - DemoApp release
I think I've cleaned up the demo-app good enough now.
I added another demo, showing the browser on the onHelp event in Notes/offline Mootools accordion.
Apart from that, I've changed the way I store JS. I now store it in a page, and use the NotesNoteCollection of the db to fetch it (look in the code). This makes it easier to implement in a Template-context.
If you test the app on something else than Notes 8, I'd appreciate feedback (preferably in the comments) on the stability of the demoapp.
To test out making friends, edit a document in the DiscworldCharacters-view (make sure the HTTP-task is running). If you're running the demo on a server, edit the Add friend-button, so that the domain is correct.
The other demos are in the BrowserDemo-form.
>> The WebBrowserControl demoapp
The flash-demos are here
Update: Martin tested the app in N6.53. That makes it at least compatible with N6.5 to N8.02.
I added another demo, showing the browser on the onHelp event in Notes/offline Mootools accordion.
Apart from that, I've changed the way I store JS. I now store it in a page, and use the NotesNoteCollection of the db to fetch it (look in the code). This makes it easier to implement in a Template-context.
If you test the app on something else than Notes 8, I'd appreciate feedback (preferably in the comments) on the stability of the demoapp.
To test out making friends, edit a document in the DiscworldCharacters-view (make sure the HTTP-task is running). If you're running the demo on a server, edit the Add friend-button, so that the domain is correct.
The other demos are in the BrowserDemo-form.
>> The WebBrowserControl demoapp
The flash-demos are here
Update: Martin tested the app in N6.53. That makes it at least compatible with N6.5 to N8.02.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Fun with the WebBrowser Control - Finishing up
I'm more or less satisfied with what I've accomplished with my experiments.
I'm now able to "bootstrap" (in lack of a better term) a JS-library/HTML to a WebBrowser control. This enables you to write truly offline widgets (no HTTP-task involved) for your notes-apps.
I'm also able to bind LS-functions to the events available in the WebBrowser-control using environment variables and Execute.
I won't be able to clean up the demo-app today. Hopefully I'll be done tomorrow if nothing else comes up.
Until then, I've made another flash showing a youtube-movie inside Notes (for instruction videos/etc.), and logging of navigation (for tracking of online wizards inside Notes/etc.) in the webbrowser using the BeforeNavigate2-event.
If you want me to do make another example of integration with the WebBrowser-control, leave a comment, and I'll see what I can do.
All the flash-demos:
Demo 1 - simple usage
Demo 2 - Web autocomplete to Notes
Demo 3 - Offline Mootools-demo
Demo 4 - Web Autocomplete - Add friends
Demo 5 - Loading Youtube-movies/logging navigation
I'm now able to "bootstrap" (in lack of a better term) a JS-library/HTML to a WebBrowser control. This enables you to write truly offline widgets (no HTTP-task involved) for your notes-apps.
I'm also able to bind LS-functions to the events available in the WebBrowser-control using environment variables and Execute.
I won't be able to clean up the demo-app today. Hopefully I'll be done tomorrow if nothing else comes up.
Until then, I've made another flash showing a youtube-movie inside Notes (for instruction videos/etc.), and logging of navigation (for tracking of online wizards inside Notes/etc.) in the webbrowser using the BeforeNavigate2-event.
If you want me to do make another example of integration with the WebBrowser-control, leave a comment, and I'll see what I can do.
All the flash-demos:
Demo 1 - simple usage
Demo 2 - Web autocomplete to Notes
Demo 3 - Offline Mootools-demo
Demo 4 - Web Autocomplete - Add friends
Demo 5 - Loading Youtube-movies/logging navigation
Monday, September 8, 2008
Fun with the WebBrowser Control - Making friends
The demoapp has gone through serious a serious rewrite to make the code more reusable/flexible. I've also worked a little bit on dynamically binding events through environment variables and execute. Sadly I haven't found a way of truly dynamically binding events (On Event..).
Some of the methods for the browser-class I use are now also chainable. E.g.
Todays flash shows a little friend-making:
The document being edited has a hidden multi-value field that holds ID's to other "Discworld Characters". When a character is selected in the lookup, the id of that document is put inside a hidden field in the browser document.
When the browser is closed, the values is picked out of the browser document and added to the "friends-list". Then the document is refreshed/a lookup is run to update the list of friends (a computed for display field). This is achieved by binding a function-call to the windowclosing-event of the control.
I'm still not ready to release the demoapp. If I do that, I'm probably going to stop experimenting on the WebBrowser, and start mucking with XPages..
Some of the methods for the browser-class I use are now also chainable. E.g.
Dim browser As New Browser
Call browser.setSize(300, 400).openUrl("http://google.com")
Todays flash shows a little friend-making:
The document being edited has a hidden multi-value field that holds ID's to other "Discworld Characters". When a character is selected in the lookup, the id of that document is put inside a hidden field in the browser document.
When the browser is closed, the values is picked out of the browser document and added to the "friends-list". Then the document is refreshed/a lookup is run to update the list of friends (a computed for display field). This is achieved by binding a function-call to the windowclosing-event of the control.
I'm still not ready to release the demoapp. If I do that, I'm probably going to stop experimenting on the WebBrowser, and start mucking with XPages..