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Da Honey Pot
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Archive for the 'IBM Lotus Notes' Category
Today I have a question for the community. Actually, the question came from my boss with my current customer. As always, the simplest questions seem the hardest to resolve :-). The problem is: there are a number of agents that should run on a daily basis, but every now and then, it happens that something goes wrong (f.e. a design update with an id with insufficient rights) and the agent don’t run.
Of course it is possible to do some agent logging, send mails if an agent ran or gave errors, but is it possible to do the opposite? Receiving messages when an agent DIDN’T run? Are there any agent monitor tools or techniques? Or am I missing something very obvious here? Any ideas?
Did you ever play with the InViewEdit event? Do you also believe it’s a bit of a dangourous feature? Users that accidentally change documents because they click an editable cell? I know, there are ways to prevent this from happening in code, but a good indication of what cells can be edited (and thus “be careful when you click those”), could help. Also, this helps the user in viewing what cells can be edited from within the view.
In the example below, can you tell what cells are editable?
After creating a Notes Mail Database Size Indicator - graphic version, a version for Notes 8 Standard was introduced on Conxsys Blog.
This is a nice peace of work. The only thing I wondered: why would I need it, if you have a mail indicator as a standard feature on the Notes server? Some weeks later I found an answer on this question myself: with my client, they installed Notes 8 Basic (unfortunately not my decision) while keeping the Notes 6.5 server as running platform (unfortunately not my decision).
I saw a post on IdeaJam asking for a solution to this problem.
The thing is: if you have an action button on top of an embedded view and this button tries to run code that refreshes or saves the uidoc (t.i. the document that has the embedded view on it), this will crash your client.
In the first part of this article I talked about why you should consider the Spry framework as a valid alternative for input validation in the browser. Now I’ll demonstrate how it works in Dreamweaver and in the next article, how to transfer the validation to Domino Designer (I decided to split up the article in different parts for the Dreamweaver side and for the Domino Designer side).
Adding the input validation to a form in Dreamweaver CS3
I invite you to start the beetorial to the left. In less than 5 minutes it shows you how to add input validation to a form in Dreamweaver CS3 (although it took more than 5 hours to build it :-)). I recommend running it in full screen (press <F11> in most browsers).
It’s not only intended for Notes developers, but is also useful for anybody that wants to learn about input validation in Dreamweaver CS3.
In the beemo I start with a form I already prepared (it’s loosely based on a form I found in The Art & Science Of CSS, a very inspiring Sitepoint book about practical and visually stunning CSS techniques.
I add validation to fields for name, email, date and checkboxes and I show how it looks like in the browser.
Bare in mind that the validation messages look a bit boring at the moment, but in a future part I will demonstrate how easy it is to create validation eyecandy.
Thanks to all those who took the time and the effort to vote for a Forum Friday image. And the winner is…
I know there’s Dojo. I know there’s Prototype. jQuery. There are a lot of JavaScript libraries available, and most of them have objects dealing with input validation. I saw Rocky’s session about Dojo on LotuSphere. An inspiring session that got me started delving into it, but I found myself a bit disappointed about how it looks. There are 3 themes available that change the look and feel a bit, but they all look rather ugly to me. Creating a theme of your own, so they tell, is a huge work (and that’s why there are only 3 themes).
While thinking about alternatives, I started looking at Spry, the Adobe’s framework embedded in Dreamweaver CS3. Spry can do much more than input validation, but for now I’m only interested in this part. It’s available for free, but if you want the ease-of-use you will need Dreamweaver CS3.
In this first article about Spry, I want to show you why it can be important to you if you are a Dreamweaver user. It’s just a warming-up to get your attention actually :-).
In a second article I’ll start with a Dreamweaver prototype form and Spry it up and in a third article, I’ll transfer it to a Notes webform. If there’s enough interest, a fourth article could be about Sprying up an existing Notes webform.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I wanted to design a logo for Forum Friday. I personally like the bull in the image, Declan likes it without the bull and text. Everybody has a different opinion on this, so I thought: why not do a good old fashioned poll about it?
So I created 3 variants of the logo. Apart from the poll, you can still comment at the bottom of the article to express some more “nuance”.
A couple of days ago I read about the Forum Friday idea on Dec’s Dom Blog. In brief, this is the idea:
“The idea is called ‘Forum Friday’ and it is very easy to take part. All you need to do is go to the DeveloperWorks (notes.net) website and pick one of the many forums that are available, Have a look through some of the questions and pick one to answer. Write up your answer on you own blog and then reply in the forum with a link to your blog entry.”
Now, since SnTT has also its own logo, I reckon Forum Friday could use one too. So here’s my proposal.
Remember last week’s Notes Mail Database Size Indicator? Mike O’Brien and John Head referred to Notes 8.01, where this will be included. I liked my solution, but after seeing the screenshot, it looked a bit pale.
The new challenge was to give it a more graphical look. So I created another version, still very easy to implement, but with a better look. It conditionally displays an image of the total and used space:
- A green bar for used space less than 70%
- An orange bar for 70-89%
- A red bar for 90-100% (and up)
- A gray bar if no quotum exists.
Wouldn’t it be cool to have this in your mailbox?
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Our local admin asked me if this is doable, and I thought it was a brillant idea and a very practical example on how to use this tip: A progress bar in Lotus Notes
It’s an indicator that, eh, indicates how much space you’ve used from your mail database size quotum.
Thanks to Alex King’s Articles plugin, there’s an Articles section now in the top navigation of my website (For some reason, Alex (to the right) looks a bit like Seinfeld (to the left)to me - no offense, I’m a Seinfeld fan!)
As Alex wrote: “This plugin allows you to easily present a list of posts you select outside of your blog chronology. Very useful for featuring things that might otherwise slip into the nether regions of your archives.”
A big thank you to Alex for this. Only one issue here: the articles are not listed below the right categories. So, for the moment, don’t look at the category titles, only look at the article titles. This can be a good starting point to learn to know the content on my site.
A bit of a misleading title, sorry: I won’t advise YOU on this, I need some advise FROM YOU, the die hards, the old timers, the veterans, the experts, the wizards. This is the very first time I will go to Lotusphere, I’m the virgin, the newbie, the absolute beginner here.
I registered very late, yesterday, and booked my flight and hotel today. I will stay at a Radisson Sas hotel about 1,5 miles from Disney.
Being a new-bee ;-), I ask some help from you. I know, I can dig the web myself, but with so many sheep, eh, info, and so little time, I need a quick start, some guidelines. Some questions:
- What events are not-to-be-missed?
- How to start?
- Are all conferences close to eachother?
- Should I really plan some schedule in advance?
- Who will also attend?
- What non-conference things are also must-sees or must-have-dones overthere?
- Any other belgians out there?
- How do people recognize and find eachother in that chaos?
- Any dangers/warnings? Terrorists Against IBM Association?
- A million questions I forgot to ask.
Oh, and if you recognize me overthere, don’t be shy, just stop me, I’m always ready for a little conversation!
Some days we experience flow and we end in Programming Nirvana. On (most?) other days we feel Programmer’s Hell. I’m not talking about things that you can’t fix, but about those administrative click-clack-click-clack (repeat 100 times) days.
Here’s where Viewnify comes to the rescue!
Or Show me the honey, or It’s all about the honey… I could go on for hours like this, only to tell you that the honey is ready to be harvested! In plain english: I created a page where the most important downloads of the site are gathered, Da Honey Pot, in the top navigation.
You can download the honey (files) there immediately, but I suggest you also read the articles mentioned next to them, otherwise you don’t know what to do with it.
I threw the page online, minutes before I leave my home for 2 days to go to Rotterdam, where I will spend my New Year’s Evening. So, enjoy, and have some fun during the change of the years!
Years ago, I was wondering if it was possible to play Flash content in the Notes Client. But the interest for it disappeared, because it didn’t serve any real purpose then. Until I saw IntelliPRINT’s Dashboard Reporting: they use FusionCharts, the tool I spoke about earlier, to display its amazing charts in the client.
Now thàt is something great! Just imagine you sending an email to your boss with an impressive chart in it. But then it seems the boss is not so happy with the figures. You just act surprised, change the figures in the background, tell him he must have been mistaken, he reopens the mail to check back et voilà, an updated chart is shown! 
I updated the Charts demo database to include this Notes Client example. Do a preview of the form NotesClient in the client to see the result (but do a preview of the Charts page in the browser first to start a websession)
I like rounded corners. It makes life less edgy. Gives some curve to my existence. I started wondering how this could be achieved in the client. In the browser there are tons of techniques to find. I did some research for the client and found a post from Ben Langhinrichs about it.
He used image borders for it, and the results are surprisingly good: Domino rescales the corners in a not-so-bad way!
But I miss some things:
- What about exact corners? You wanted small corners, but they grow bigger if your table gets bigger with this technique.
- What about gradients, often used, but not possible here?
I gave it a second thought, experimented a little and came up with 6 ways to create different types of rounded corners. They’re not really all that different, but depending on what you’re trying to achieve and your graphical skills and tools, you can choose an approach.
Challenge
- Find doclink in a richtext field.
- Use doclink to get linked document and retrieve some values from it.
When I started developing Viewnify, I stumbled upon all kind of problems and at first it was really hard to discover where the troubles were located.
Viewnify extensively uses DXL to alter the design of all views of a database. For those who don’t know what DXL is yet, it’s an XML representation of Domino data or design elements. In other words, such file can contain all info stored in a document or all design properties from a design element, or even a whole database. This gives you all kinds of powerful possibilities. But with great power comes great responsibility (sorry, I just had to use this quote here, couldn’t resist ;-))
Layers in the Notes Client? Why would I use them? On the web, with css-based designs, I can see why, but in the Client? That was my opinion until a week ago. I thought they were cool, but I didn’t really had a place for them in my applications. But then there was a guy called Basir Noutash, who sent me a form with a layer in it as some kind of dialog box.
“Hmm… good thinking”, I thought. And “what else could there be done with it?” I started to experiment and came up with 5 possible uses for layers.
A layer can be:
- a dialog box
- a text popup
- an image lightbox
- a wizard
- a way of protecting content
(4 votes, average: 3.75 out of 5)
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