Great! With XPages and the Extension Library we can connect to external databases easily! But what if you have connection problems? Or what if your queries are wrong? You want to be able to debug them, right? So how do you test this?
The easiest way would be if you could test right in Domino Designer. Luckily enough, we’re in an Eclipse environment, so there are plugins available we can install. And there happens to be the QuantumDB Eclipse Plugin that does exactly this.
A very short question for the experts out there: what should I use for source control in Designer? We have some CIAO!-licenses here we could start using, but what are the additional benefits of CIAO!? Is it easier/better integrated/more stable? Or not really worth the money? I checked Teamstudio’s site, but they don’t really offer a real comparison with the open source alternatives out there. So, what do you use for your version control?
Yesterday I spoke at BLUG for my very first time. I had the privilege to work together with Mark Myers, Matt White and Mark Leusink, 3 giants from the Domino world, so I consider myself lucky for this 
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It was a great learning moment and quite some fun too, so thank you for that! Also, a big thank you to Theo Heselmans for organising the event, that was once again a success!
If you know what Notes.net means, then you’re old . In the early Notes-era, if we had a problem, we could:
At that time, it was interesting to add those sites to your browser search engine list.
Since StackOverflow is rapidly becoming the new first aid tool for all your Domino development and infrastructure, I figured it makes sense to add the site to my Firefox search engines too.
A quick search brought me this add-on, one click further et voilà: 
Hurray! IBM Connect 2013 pdfs of presentations have arrived! One week after the event! Thank you thank you! Well… I had different expectations about this.
I have an XPages application that is querying a DB2 table via JDBC, and it takes a couple of seconds before it returns some data I display in a nice grid after a partial update.
The thing is: if the user should wait a couple of seconds, he should be warned, so that he knows something is going on. First of all, it’s nice, user friendly and polite. Secondly, you don’t want your user to get all experimental and starting to click all over the place in order to get some feedback. Because he will, eventually 
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My client wanted me to develop a webservice consumer that sends it requests to a Documentum webservice. I had some previous experiences with LotusScript webservice classes generated by Domino automatically, but this turned out to be a non-solution, because I had to access the SOAP header. I had to enter the Scary Java World for a proper alternative… It became quite a queeste!
Since Domino 8.5 it should be possible to debug your java agents directly in the Domino Designer IDE. In theory. It’s documented in the help, but it took me several hours (and more) to get it to work. This is how I use it, and some caveats I encountered. I think my way of working is easier than how it is explained in Help, so follow these steps to locally debug a Java agent (“foreground debugging”)
Since I started developing in XPages, customers don’t seem to realize that the browser page they’re looking at was created with Domino. Often, if they think of Notes, they see dinosaurs and a sinking Titanics. When they taste XPages, it doesn’t look like anything they know about Notes.
So, it’s our task to advertise, and to show the world: “Hey, this is XPages! This is Domino!”. However, when I started looking for a decent image to use, I didn’t find any. I don’t like this image. So I created my own:
If you want the button only, it looks like this:
As always, right-click to save the images and feel free to use them.
After reworking an application in my Designer 8.5 I asked my collegue to test it in his Notes 6.5 client. To my surprise he couldn’t open any document, the only thing he saw was a white screen and an hour glass. Many trials, errors and crashes later, I found out that the older Notes versions have issues with too many subforms.
Here are a couple of links to add Notes.Net to your Internet Explorer/Firefox search bars. Enjoy!
In an older post, I wrote about how the left margin can disappear when you try to insert a subform in a tabbed table, f.e.
If you have a Bluetooth capable car stereo, there’s no real reason why you would try to install an Airport Express in your car. My previous car could stream music with bluetooth. Since 2 months I own a new car (a Peugeot RCZ) with (what I thought) state-of-the-art audio/video capabilities, thanks to the WIP COM 3D (with multimedia and navigation).
Apparently, it only supports bluetooth for telephone, not for streaming music 
. So, if I want to play my iTunes songs, I had to convert them all to mp3, copy them to the internal car harddisk or an SD-card, and then… use the way playlists work in the car, t.i. sorted by song title. If I want to hear a song starting with a V, I could force my hand just by the number of turns on the huge button to make.
A while ago, the company I currently work for used an adapted version of the resource reservations database for Domino 6.5. You know how it works: users wanted extras like checkbox-room-has-a-projector or checkbox-we-want-coffee-with-the-room or checkbox-send-a-mail-to-the-guard. The programmer says yes to every question and bingo, you have a RR database that’s not so standard any more.
Finally multitasking and app groups came to the iPad! Needless to say I was eager to do the upgrade… So I saw iTunes discovered the new version, suggests I should upgrade, the progress bar appears…
… appears to get stuck on 90%. No panic yet… just do it again, right? Now iTunes tells me the iPad needs recovery and then there’s an error stating recovery did not succeed. Ok, tried again, after reboot of iMac… same story.
Ah, internet! Let me take a look… hmm… lots of people with similar issues… Force recovery mode… Blam! Dead at 95%! Some people suggest you should keep waiting and this will eventually disappear, but I kept waiting a couple of times…
Just when I thought I was left with an expensive mirror or that I would have to go to an Apple Service Center to make it “just work”, I read a post where somebody explained he reinstalled iTunes, then tried the recovery. Don’t ask me why (hell, maybe they don’t know why at Apple yet), but this did the trick.
I have a form in Notes with a computed passthru html table on it, and I really really would like to see the values in a certain column displayed on one line without wordwrap. Guess what: it’s not gonna happen, because Notes doesn’t care about width attributes or styles. It’s as if Notes thinks these are more like suggestions instead of rules.
If you ever bump into this message when opening, refreshing or saving a document, there’s probably a field on your document breaking the 32K or 64K limit of the maximum field size for simple text fields.
I know the website was down for a (long) while, but since I wasn’t really posting any articles for a while, I didn’t really bother.
But thanks to the “community-feeling” present at ILUG, I started thinking about my website again… I may not be a top XPage developer, but there are still things out there that don’t use XPages (yet). And in my day-to-day job I still discover errors and have ideas that are also useful to others.
So this weekend I wanted my website up again, and after all it seemed just a WordPress plug-in that caused the troubles. Many thanks to the chat helpdesk of my provider one.com to assist me in this!
We know the power of action and link hotspots. It would be great if we could create them computed, f.e. to give it a computed description or to create a number of hotspots that can vary. I’m sure you know some applications for this yourself (just nostalgically think of those times you bumped your head against the wall in rage ).
It turns out not to be that difficult, but there are some gotchas and restrictions. But don’t be afraid, I’ll take you by the hand and show you where the mines are…
It could look like this:
I have no idea what will happen next…
Or… is an operating system anno 2008 that advanced that it doesn’t recognize if I’m trying to move OR copy the files and can’t it adjust its message accordingly?
I have another one for you: “Do you like beer or do you prefer wine?” (Yes/No)