Andre Guirard wrote a nice interesting piece of document regarding considerations for application development. The document you can download here.

Recently I have asked to write down some ‘best practices’ from a developer perspective. I see a lot of Andre’s writing return in this, also since most of my work was ‘just’ a collection of documents / papers / hints & tips I have collected the past years.

I will wrote some additional performance considerations which I did not find back in Andre’s work:

Use @trim in all translation events for fields type text, this avoids that you later have to use it in view columns

@Trim(@ReplaceSubstring(@ThisValue; @Char(9):@Newline; ” “))

—-

Make sure when using subforms something is written in Globals of the subform, it dus not matter what (Notes only)

Dim loadfaster As Integer
loadfaster =True

The more subforms you have the more effect code in Globals has.

—-

Don’t use “Print” so much (LotusScript)

Minimize the use of the Print statement when performing actions in long loops. Printing a lot of messages to the status bar or console uses a surprising amount of memory, and it can have a noticible impact on an otherwise fast-running loop. Specifically, the memory used by each Print statement is not released until the entire agent is finished.

—-

Avoid large or complex tables

Large or complex tables can greatly affect the speed with which a form can be rendered (both in the client and in the browser). In particular, avoid tables with a huge number of rows, a lot of nesting, or a large number of hide-when conditions.

—-

For agents: avoid Reader fields when possible

Using Reader fields can slow down all of your document processing code across the board, because the database has to evaluate the reader fields for each document before it can even attempt to do anything with them. This is especially true when the agent signer doesn’t have access to a large number of documents in the database, because the documents that aren’t visible still have to be evaluated before they can be skipped.

—-

Share NotesView References

If you need to use a reference to a view multiple times in your code, get the view only once and share the reference (either using a global or static variable, or by passing a NotesView object as a parameter in functions/subs/methods). Accessing views using getView is a very expensive operation.

—-

Use @Function Agents For Simple Document Modifications

If you just need to modify, add, or delete one or several [non rich-text] fields in all or selected documents in a view, it is much faster to use an agent with simple @Functions (rather than LotusScript or Java) that runs against all or selected documents. 

—-

Resize Arrays Infrequently

ReDim your arrays as infrequently as possible. However, if you have to append data to an array quite often, Redim Preserve is MUCH more efficient than many calls to ArrayAppend

—

Default view

Whenever your application is opened, your default view is opened. Always be sure that this is a view that opens quickly.

—-

Use buttons and picklists instead of drop-down lists

In some cases, there are so many drop-down lists, and they’re so large and used so frequently, that the only reasonable solution is to stop using them on the main form. The line of reasoning to use is to ask yourself the following questions:

• How many times will a document be read in its life?
• How many times will a document be edited?
• Of the times it’s edited, how many times will these lookups be required?

—-

Use DigestSearch Method

For searching server-based databases from a Notes client, DigestSearch is twice as fast as any other search method available, outperforming both full-text search and LotusScript’s GetDocumentByKey method. You call DigestSearch using this LotusScript command:

Set doc=FastSearchByKey(db, “searchword”)

Like I said before, this is ‘collected work’ so I take no responsibility if it would not increase performance. See it as food for thought =)

I do not know how many times I have written a class for aligning a text right or left. Too many, that’s for sure.

The idea with a CSS toolbox is to include a separate stylesheet for these “utility” styles. A CSS toolbox contains styling information that is nothing unique to any particular web application. It’s a collection of common styles that can be useful on any web development project.

A CSS toolbox is not a CSS reset and it is not a CSS framework. And it contains none of the special styling that makes any web application so unique.

Using a CSS toolbox will save you some time. It saves you from writing the same styles over and over again.  If you use the same toolbox your markup will share the same common class names and makes it easier for you to jump back into and understand it.

Here is mine:

/*
AUTHOR: YOUR NAME HERE
you@domain.com

*/
/*
RESETS, BASIC PAGE SETUP, BASIC TYPOGRAPHY
*/
* { margin: 0; padding: 0; }

html { overflow-y: scroll; }

body { font: 62.5% Helvetica, sans-serif; }

ul { list-style: none inside; }

p { font: 1.3em/1.3em; margin-bottom: 1.3em; }

a { outline: none; }

a img { border: none; }
/*
LAYOUT TOOLS
*/
.floatleft { float: left; }

.floatright { float: right; }

.clear { clear: both; }

.transpBlack { background: url(transpBlack.png); }
.layoutCenter { margin: 0 auto; }
.textCenter { text-align: center; }
.textRight { text-align: right; }
.textLeft { text-align: left; }

/*
TYPOGRAPHIC TOOLS
*/
.error { border: 1px solid #fb4343; padding:3px; color: #fb4343; }
.warning { border: 1px solid #d4ac0a; padding: 3px; color: #d4ac0a; }
.success { border: 1px solid #149b0d; padding: 3px; color: #149b0d; }
.callOut { font-size: 125%; font-weight: bold; }
.strikeOut { text-decoration: line-through; }
.underline { text-decoration: underline; }
.resetTypeStyle { font-weight: normal; font-style:normal; font-size: 100%; text-decoration: none; background-color: none; word-spacing: normal; letter-spacing: 0px; text-

transform: none; text-indent: 0px; }

/*
PAGE STRUCTURE
*/

#page-wrap {
 width: 775px;
 margin: 0 auto;
}

/*
PRINT TOOLS
*/
.page-break { page-break-before: always; }

/*
DISPLAY VALUES
*/
.hide { display: none; }
.show { display: block; }
.invisible { visibility: hidden; }

Sometimes my thoughts are not so bad =)

Thank you Maureen for listening to our thoughts. We can’t wait for Designer 8.5!

According to Wikipedia refers XML data binding to the process of representing the information in an XML document as an object in computer memory. This allows applications to access the data in the XML from the object rather than using the DOM to retrieve the data from a direct representation of the XML itself.

In other words you could tie HTML tables to Notes data and navigate through it without reloading the page.

For this SNTT demo I needed:

• a form to create Book documents with
• a view to present the books documents as XML
• a page on which I define an HTML table and connect the table to the XML view in order to give it content
• (a $$ViewTemplate for the Xml view)

First step:

• Create your Notes form with some fields. I choose Title, Author, ISBN and Price.
• Create a set of documents with this form.

Next:

• Create a view that presents the ‘Books’ documents as XML data.
• On the fifth tab under ‘Web access’ d not forget to set the option ‘Treat view contents as HTML’
• The view must start with an opener and closing tag for each document
• For each column you define sub child elements

• Setup a $$ViewTemplate for this View in order to be able to add a root element:

Reminder: do not forget to set the content-type for this Form as HTML.

Continue:

• Create a Form/Page that will hold the HTML Table.
• Add the following HTML on it:

As you can see the Table is linked to a datasource, in this case the View books.xml. Each TD in the TBody part is linked to a datafield. In this setup the datapagesize is set to 5, meaning 5 documents at a time will be displayed.

Some extras

By giving the table an ID (xmlTBL) you can add functions to navigate through the table such as:

• previous / next set of documents
• first / last set of documents

I bet you can imagine some much better pagination examples.

At the end your ‘bookstore’ will look like this:

I have included a working example here.

Okej, one day too late for SNTT, but some people are also allowed to post SNTT’s already on Wednesdays it seems…

Alen Grakalic wrote a nice article about using pure CSS as data charts. Basically via CSS Alen presents pure data in a graphical way.

Here is how it could look like:

(almost weekend? or those pills do work?!)

The screen capture is information from a Domino View embedded on a page and transformed with some CSS. Nice? I guess this is a very cheap way of creating more dashboard alike solutions…

Anyway, for those who are curious here is a downloadable working example. Have a nice weekend!

We have plans for upgrading to Notes 8.01 and the end of may so logically I received the question to test some of the applications I believe are vital for us doing business.

The main question I have is ‘Where to test for ?‘

A quick ask-around among in my personal network did not lead to any topic to pay attention to. Most of my contacts are not up to Notes8 neither do they have that intention for the next 3 months.

Some minutes of Google-ing did also not bring many answers which sounds promising (no problems at all?).

Nevertheless we have set up test environment with Notes8 server and here are some results which I consider for most of mine applications (document publishing tools) quiet alarming.

Copy Selected as Table

In Notes:

In a Browser:

Where did the icons go ???

A copied table from the web

In Notes:

In a Browser:

Somewhere a center alignment is added which can not be allocated in the Notes client…

I also discovered that the merging of columns and rows in a table give nasty, unexpected (and unwanted) results.

So I am wondering what problems / questions other people are experiencing in Notes8? Thanks in advance!

Currently I am collecting all sorts of information about implementing the DOJO Toolkit in Lotus Domino applications. Basically for preparing myself for a upcoming project to ‘pimp’ an existing web-application using this JS Framework.

Untill now I have been only working with Prototype and Scriptaculous (which I like a lot) but since IBM’s horizon also shines more and more Dojo I am really curious in DOJO’s capabilities. Especially since documentation seems to be getting better and better.

I have found a good presentation about implementing the Dojo Toolkit in Lotus Domino applications on Slideshare. You can find the presentation here.

It seems that more and more Notes related people find the time and effort in uploading their presentations on this site, which is ofcourse a very good thing! (HINT)

One of the blogs I often read is the one from Antonio Lupetti who is a Web developer, not a Notes developer. Especially his article about pagination caught my attention since it remembered me about the idea to rewrite Bob Obringers ‘ultimate view navigator’.

Bob uses in his approach for the pagination a table to display the page numbers where a list should be more suitable.

As the image below shows with Antonio’s approach it is pretty easy to make the pagination more compatible with examples seen on other well known sites. Here is a Flickr alike pagination for a Domino view:

Anything new under the sun? Not really, but for the ‘purists’ under us more esthetic solution.

Ofcourse a working example can be found here.

Some minutes before a meeting so I will shortly pick up the tread “How I got started with Lotus Notes”.

I started with Notes in the beginning of 1997 after doing a graduation project at one of Dupont’s factory-plants (basically I was collecting annual sales data for writing reports).

At the end everyone was really satisfied and I got the question if I would be interested in setting up their intranet site. Notes 4.5 was rolled out and already in use in other countries/plants.

I got training at IBM and it helped a lot that in those days I had to travel a lot by train so the yellow Lotus Notes book I knew soon by head.

After one year I saw an advertisement that a big company in electronics in the Netherlands where looking for people to train in LN and they offered the complete education (application development and system administration) so after 3 months I was able to call my self principle lotus notes professional in both areas.

Then after a couple of years some collegues asked me if I was interested in starting a consultancy company, basically because they needed a person with good web development skills in LN. I said yes and after some wonderful years internal relations went a bit down and I decided to start freelancing, enjoying my own responsibilities.

In 2005 I decided to take the next step by looking for working options abroad and in beginning 2006 I moved to Sweden where I am currently employed at a true IBM technology adapting company…

The problem with the Notes tabbed table is that you can not, by default, add an action when you click on a tab.

I created a tabbed table function in the way you probably would do it on the web (with hidding/showing divs) so a tab is just a table column with a text hotspot in it. When you click on the text a different table would be shown with an ‘active tab’ highlighted:

The reason for this solution is that the form is presented in a dialogbox and I have to set a parameter from which tab the user has selected a document-template (templates may be stored in different databases).

So how to fix this with a Notes tabbed table outlook?

First create images for all active tabs:

 &

Then sharpen your eyes (or use good photo-editor program) and select a part of the horizontal row/border that aligns the table to the width of the page (correctly described?):

This is an enlarged example:

Now place your tabbed images in separate tables, give the table a background color and a cell image of the ‘zoomed’ example:

On your ‘tabbed’ images you place hotspot rectangles that will do the hide/when-work. Here you can write now also the action that is not possible for a normal ‘tabbed table’:

At the end the result will look something like this:

My (new) boss has great faith in me so he has made me responsible (yippie) for one of our key LN applications for communicating withing the organisation (an application for publishing documents on our intranet).

Since I am new & fresh & (still) eager in the organisation I am looking for an application that can support me in this task. Mainly the application should be able to store communication (emails), documentation (with or without attachments) and maybe a FAQ section.

No fancy stuff, please just an application for the Notes client.

My search on OpenNTF did not give me an answer in my quest. Therefor my question to you:

“which tool do you use for giving support on LN applications?”

Some people are just not that fortunate to have the privilige to be working with such an excellent tool as Lotus Notes is. In order to give them the option to add an action document created in a Notes application to their todo list in Outlook the code below will do the job:  

Sub Click(Source As Button)
 
 Dim ws As New NotesUIWorkspace
 Dim session As New NotesSession
 Dim db As NotesDatabase
 Dim uiddoc As NotesUIDocument
 
 Set db = session.CurrentDatabase
 Set uidoc = ws.Currentdocument
 Set doc = uidoc.document
 
 If uidoc.IsNewDoc Then
  Msgbox “This document has not been saved.” & Chr$(10) & Chr$(10) & “Please save prior to mailing this action!”, 4112, “New Document”
  Exit Sub
 End If
 
 Const Formula$ = { @DbLookup(”"; “”; “$People”; AssignedTo; “Email”) }
 Dim namesList As Variant
 
 Set myOlApp = CreateObject(”Outlook.Application”)
 Set myNameSpace = myOlApp.GetNameSpace(”MAPI”)
 Set myFolder = myNameSpace.GetDefaultFolder(13)
 Set myItem = myOlApp.CreateItem(3)
 
 Dim rtItem As NotesRichTextItem
 Set rtItem = doc.GetFirstItem(”Comment1″)
 
 With myItem
  .Assign
  namesList = Evaluate(Formula$, doc)
  Forall names In namesList
   Set myRecipients = .Recipients.Add(names) 
  End Forall
  .Subject = doc.Subject(0)
  .Body = “Action number: ” & doc.ActionNumber(0) & Chr$(10) & Chr$(10) & rtItem.text
  If (doc.NoDueDate(0)=”") Then 
   .DueDate = doc.DueDate(0) 
  End If
  .Importance = doc.Priority(0)
  .Status = doc.Status(0)
  .Categories = doc.Category(0)
  .Display
 End With
 
 doc.OutlookSave = Date$
 
 Set myOlApp = Nothing
 Set myFolder = Nothing
 Set myItem = Nothing
 Set myRecipients = Nothing
 Exit Sub
 
End Sub

Dive deep into the significant changes to development that Notes and Domino 8 brings. This seminar is guaranteed to shorten your learning curve through detailed explanations, live demos, practical examples, and working code to quickly get you up and running with ND8 development.

I just received green light to register myself for this event. See you there? Looking forward!

Showing document information in the normal ‘vertical’ way can sometimes be pretty boring. It also requires a lot of space especially when images as part of the information becomes involved.

On the WWW a lot of examples can be found how to create a ‘CSS Image Gallery‘

But you will see when images have different sizes and their caption text underneath will differ the result will be quickly dis-satisfying:

Ofcourse you can set the same height and width on the images. But what for the caption text?

With a little bit of DOM scripting using Prototype you can simply rebuild your screen and show the view in a table format. Add the following code to the JS onLoad event:

//ALL DOCUMENT INFORMATION (ROW) IS DISPLAYED IN A DIV WITH CLASS THUMBNAIL:
varThumbs = $$(’div.thumbnail’);
varThumbs.each(Element.hide);
//NUMBER OF COLUMNS:
var numberDocs = 3
var varRowCounter = 1
var varTable=”";
if (varThumbs.length > 0) {
 varTable+=”<table border=0>”;
 varTable+=”<tr>”;
 for (i=0; i< varThumbs.length; i++) {
  //FYI (5 % 5) =>  5 Mod 5 returns 0
  if (varRowCounter % numberDocs == 0){
   varTable+=”<td valign=\”top\” onmouseover=\”style.backgroundColor=’#F4F4F4′;\” onmouseout=\”style.backgroundColor=’#FFF’;\”>” + varThumbs[i].innerHTML + “</td></tr><tr>”
   varRowCounter=1
  }  
  else{
   varTable+=”<td valign=\”top\” onmouseover=\”style.backgroundColor=’#F4F4F4′;\” onmouseout=\”style.backgroundColor=’#FFF’;\”>” + varThumbs[i].innerHTML + “</td>”
   varRowCounter+=1
  }  
 }
 varTable+=”</tr>”;
 varTable+=”</table>”;
}
$(’viewbody’).replace(varTable)

‘viewbody’ is the DIV where the $$ViewBody field is nested.

I am currently writing some documents including simple tests/code examples that should help our (Domino) developers in grading their levels of experience.

Searching on the web I found some documents that describe different levels on different technical areas’ (mostly used for grading web developers) like:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• RSS

When it concerns Notes/Domino related levels, what different areas would you specify?

• @Formula/@Functions
• LotusScript
• JAVA
• XML/DXL
• Agents
• ACL/Security
• Events (Forms and Views)
• Web Services
• …

I am just curious what areas of expertise within Lotus Notes/Domino (from a developer point of view) you think are worth defining and grading into levels?

Thank you!

“Structure and hierarchy reduce complexity and improve readability. The more organized your articles or web-sites are, the easier it is for users to follow your arguments and get the message you are trying to deliver. On the Web this can be done in a variety of ways.In body copy headlines and enumerations are usually used to present the information as logically separated data chunks. An alternative solution is pagination, a mechanism which provides users with additional navigation options for browsing through single parts of the given article. Parts of the article are usually referred to by numbers, hints, arrows as well as “previous” and “next”-buttons.

Search engines almost always use pagination; newspapers tend to make use of it for navigation through the parts of rather large articles. And there are situations when pagination is also necessary for weblogs. Additional navigation can simplify the access to some site pages — e.g. make it easier for users to browse through the archives of the site.

In most cases pagination is better than traditional “previous - next” navigation as it offers visitors a more quick and convenient navigation through the site. It’s not a must, but a useful nice-to-have-feature.“

The above article on Smashing Magazine shows that in my working example there are enough points for improvement:

for example:

In a previous writing I explained how you can create a navigation-menu that collects it’s information straight from a Notes View.

Using the ?ReadViewEntries URL command Notes outputs the view data in XML form which can be the source of a transformation to HTML using the XSLTProcessor in your browser.

When the project became actual again I found some time to improve it’s functionality, since it was not working 100% in Firefox. So here is an example available for downloading.

Here is short summary of the example’s features:

• the navigator collects it’s source data from a Notes view using the ReadViewEntries command
• when navigating through the menu for each subcategory (via the + and - icons) a new AJAX request is done to collect the information withing that (sub)category (so the amount of data is being divided into smaller parts)
• the information is being transformed into HTML via the build XSLTransformator of the browser
• when clicking on (sub)category a collection of responding documents is collected and presented in another frame
• the navigator also contains document links which will load the document info in the right frame when clicked
• documents can be grouped under whatever structure in the View

Very nice, I did not manage to solve 1 thing yet: if a (sub)category contains subcategories AND documents, the documents are being displayed FIRST. I rather would display the subcategories first and then the documents. Maybe you can help me with that one?

Documentation is something we would (like to) do if there would be time calculated for it in every project. But in a lot of development projects the customer is not interested to pay for something he/she is not going to read at all so where to ’store’ the application logic?

To my opinion it can help to use the IBM like approach in delivering brief documention in their templates, just like Rocky Oliver talked in his session ‘Creating Maintainable IBM Lotus Notes and Domino Applications - Writing Readable Code’ at Lotusphere 2007.

How do you deliver your documentation?

A sample of above can be found here.

While waiting on the next plane I write this little posting about a simple technique used in the very nice !!Help!! application available on OpenNTF which give a basic support for different languages support across an application.

Actually I was looking at a more advanced solution using Yahoos Translator utily, but time made me decide to the most easy/quickest approach making the most benefit of Domino functions itself.

While my main focus is development for the web the technique can still be easily used across forms. Here is how it works:

• In Notes documents you define the values for each language you want to suppport, mostly these values are grouped by the design element you use them in or the specific type of element they present (field labels, action buttons… things like that)

• On the design element itself you make a connection to the preferred language selected by the user, in my example it is a normal document that is being treated like a ‘profile document’:

• Add lookup fields for each ‘language’ document you have created:

• On the place in the design element where you want to show/use the related value you strip the results and return the result:

That’s it! But… wait. This does not work for buttons on a form because Domino allows not a computed value/label for it.

JSON to the rescue!

The most easiest way to get the values in an array I thought was transforming them in a JSON format wia basic @Functions:

With this array I easily approach all my <input> type buttons via Prototype and replace their values with the value defined in the array:

A downloadable working example can be found here. I wonder which language support systems you are using?

This post describes briefly an implementation of Scriptaculous’ Ajax.Autocompleter class.

It uses an AJAX request using a Page element for an @DBLookup I believe first mentioned at Lotusphere 2007 by Jack Rattcliff and later (?) by Jake Howlett in his http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/unid/BLOG-20060221 and perfectionized (?) by my collegue Tomas.

Scriptaculous autocompleter needs an unordered list in return. For instance this list might be returned after the user typed the letter “y”:

<ul>
    <li>your mom</li>
    <li>yodel</li>
</ul>

Some examples use an agent to return the unordered list, others describe using a page.

The demo allows you to fill in multiple fields after clicking on one of the presented suggestions by splitting the responseText:

In demo-mode it would look something like this:

For downloading a working example click here.