This, that and the other (may contain nuts)

Steve Castledine

Dominoblog - give me the dirt

Steve Castledine  26 February 2010 10:04:46 GMT
Image:Dominoblog - give me the dirtThe subject is slightly tongue in cheek, but the question is a serious one.

I've read on more than one occasion this week the line "difficult to use" for DominoBlog. So I need to find out what is the part that is difficult to use. From a user standpoint creating a blog entry should be no more difficult than creating a new email. Creating a new blog is no more difficult than "File > Application > New" (not that I like that, but its the same for all Domino applications).

So I can only assume its not that process that is a problem, but if it is let me know. I guess the tricky side is the flexibility of creating a Domino web site exactly how you want it without using Designer. However, like any software that creates a web site, you cannot avoid html. Maybe there are specific things you want to do but want them automatic? Maybe its just documentation on some keys things, if so what?

So this is an open discussion, tell me your pain points, tell me what you need, your ideas on making it easier, anything.

OpenNTF gives us a unique opportunity in that I can get you some of this directly without waiting for a build cycle, funding and someone to translate into x number of languages. I will put aside some vacation day/s to get some of these things improved or maybe just documented. With some of the bigger things then why not volunteer and we can build as a community team.

I do understand there is a "enterprise" gap which Lotus Connections mostly fills, but you need it slightly better for DominoBlog. I personally do not like "File > Application > New" as in the enterprise those pesky admin's have mostly made this redundant for browser based apps as they don't want you creating applications here, there and everywhere. I did design a "template deployment app" where an admin can set controls and sleep at night knowing users are doing things to their rules, however so far it has remained on the beer mat it was written on (next to my housework rota). This needs kicking off (community project anyone?).

So the floor is open, however in the meantime some helpful links:

There is user help in Lotus Notes under Help > Help Contents > Lotus Notes > Web logs

Image:Dominoblog - give me the dirt

Download Blog Template from OpenNTF
Full list of blog related articles on this site
Wiki Article on themes and tags
Converting a theme from Wordpress part 1 and part 2
Switching on anti spam (100% effective against non manual spam)
Dominoblog 8.01 upgrade presentation
Intranet Journal - Setting up DominoBlog
Podcasting with Dominoblog

Will add more as I remember them

Just a teaser of some new XPages samples

Steve Castledine  25 February 2010 11:07:45 GMT
There's some XPages code that I have been trying to finish so I can upload to OpenNTF - so here's just a teaser (as I think there will be some good reusable parts):

Image:Just a teaser of some new XPages samples

Image:Just a teaser of some new XPages samples

XPages: Validating Radio Groups Client Side

Steve Castledine  17 February 2010 09:45:48 GMT
This has come up twice recently so thought I would share a few tips.

Server side validation of radio groups and also check box groups on a basic level is very simple. You navigate to the component properties and add a "required" (xp:validateRequired) validation rule via data > validators.

I say simple however other components do have this available on a specific validation tab whereas these you have to drill down to the properties:

Image:XPages: Validating Radio Groups Client Side
If you want to do more advanced validation then the value is available via getComponent("radiogroup").getValue(). Depending on where on the page you are trying to validate the value (maybe before the component) you may need to use getSubmittedValue() instead but mostly getValue() is what you would use.

Client side is a little trickier, as just like any web application and javascript accessing of radio group values its not available as a single value but as independent values of the radio group (or check box) child values.

To make it harder you have to get values via the "form" element and even harder I find JSF style name's are not liked in browsers for looking up named elements of a form (at least it was a struggle for me) so you have to traverse the entire form to get the element you need and then get the value you want.

The code below is an example of what I mean. First it goes through all the form elements to find what we need, then it iterates through the child elements to find the value. Note how it uses #{id:myRadioGroupID} to calculate the eventual component name (which may actually be: view:_id1:myRadioGroupID).

var result=null;

for(var i=0; i<document.forms[0].elements.length; i++){

if(document.forms[0].elements[i].name=="#{id:myRadioGroupID}" ){

if(document.forms[0].elements[i].checked == true){
        result=document.forms[0].elements[i].value;
        break; //remove this if for check box groups and collect multiple values above instead
}}}

alert(result);

XPages: Hide Detail Rows

Steve Castledine  16 February 2010 14:41:42 GMT
Very quiet around here as very busy (some very cool stuff) and still catching up on "I will document that for you" from Lotusphere. So here's one off that list "Hide Detail Rows".

So in Notes development we have the ability to add numeric values to columns and add totals. Often we are not interested in the number per row but just the totals, maybe by category:

Image:XPages: Hide Detail Rows
So we set the view column property "Hide Detail Rows" to achieve this:

Image:XPages: Hide Detail Rows
When we want to do the same for XPages, this particular property is not carried forward and so when creating a default view we get:

Image:XPages: Hide Detail Rows
So the first thing we need to do for this example is to make it a whole number. To do this we navigate to the column properties and section "data" and set display type to Number, and format as Decimal, Integer only.

Image:XPages: Hide Detail Rows
We then need to hide the detail rows, but before that we need to assign a "name" to our row data so we can reference it. We do this in the view panel properties under data and "var" (set to "rowData" below).

Image:XPages: Hide Detail Rows
We then change our totals column to display a computed value. Our computed value would then detect whether we are a category or document row (using isCategory()) and display a value accordingly:

Image:XPages: Hide Detail Rows
Image:XPages: Hide Detail Rows

if(rowData.isCategory()){return rowData.getColumnValue("$2")}


Image:XPages: Hide Detail Rows

Lotusphere 2010 warm up videos

Steve Castledine  14 January 2010 15:57:15 GMT
Found these warm up videos for Lotusphere 2010, getting excited yet?:




and of course:


XPages Discussion Template - new build available on OpenNTF

Steve Castledine  13 January 2010 16:31:41 GMT
I have uploaded a new build of the XPages Discussion forum to OpenNTF. You can download from here.

This update enhances the existing XPage interface allowing more topics to be visible within the views and enhanced discussion thread viewing.

Enjoy :)

Image:XPages Discussion Template - new build available on OpenNTF
Image:XPages Discussion Template - new build available on OpenNTF

    Millies first snowman

    Steve Castledine  6 January 2010 13:34:55 GMT
    We finally have a winter this year. The rest of the country has had a fair bit of snow, but we have had about 2cm max.

    But we still have a snowman:

    Image:Millies first snowman

    Image:Millies first snowman

    For those building Lotusphere Schedule applications

    Steve Castledine  6 January 2010 13:27:50 GMT
    Can I ask you to add this session to your databases (thank you):

    Meeting Name: OpenNTF Annual General Meeting
    Date of Meeting/Function: Tuesday, 1/19 – 6pm – 7pm
    Hotel: Yacht and Beach Conference Center
    Room/Function Area Name: Cape Cod C

    OpenNTF Open Source Lotus Awards nominations close Wednesday

    Steve Castledine  4 January 2010 14:25:17 GMT
    Just a quick reminder that the OpenNTF Open Source Lotus Awards nominations close Wednesday, see here.

    A reminder also that there are entries where the submitter has been asked to add a licence file etc and so far have not. These queries by the IP manager will need resolving to qualify for entry.

    XPages Wiki build 0.06 available

    Steve Castledine  23 December 2009 18:13:54 GMT
    Went through the reported bugs and fixed as many as possible and so a new build is available here.

    Template is Domino XPages 8.5.1 only at this point.

    Will upload another update soon.

    Simple XPages Theme Tip

    Steve Castledine  18 December 2009 11:56:34 GMT
    There was a question "how do I allocate a particular theme to a particular XPage?", this is because in general the theme set is for the entire nsf and changing it for one XPage means changing it for all (via the application properties).

    However if you think about this differently, and almost as an extension to the XPage itself when it builds its header information, you will see that one theme does not mean fixed settings for all as the power of the theme is about computation via the rendered attribute.

    So instead of trying to use multiple theme's and coding the actual theme change via back-end code and reloading the page, just compute everything in the theme itself. For example if we had a red.xsp and a blue.xsp and they needed different style sheets because of their different colour requirements we can compute the delivery of these style sheets from one theme as:

    <resource rendered="#{javascript:facesContext.getViewRoot().getViewId().equals('/blue')}">
            <content-type>text/css</content-type>
            <href>blue.css</href>
    </resource>
    <resource rendered="#{javascript:facesContext.getViewRoot().getViewId().equals('/red')}">
            <content-type>text/css</content-type>
            <href>red.css</href>
    </resource>

      Further discussion template view tweaks

      Steve Castledine  9 December 2009 14:45:07 GMT
      Couple of tweaks just designed to provide even more "visible" topics in one view. Feedback required - demo here.

      New:
      Image:Further discussion template view tweaks
      Old:
      Image:Further discussion template view tweaks