In my case, “too many” equals 11 subforms. After that, the form becomes from “terribly slow” to “unusable”. Because I didn’t want to lose the advantages of using subforms, I looked around for a solution. I found some answers in this (dutch) post.

It seems that, if you add some code to the subforms (f.e. add an Option Declare in the Global section of the subforms) the issues disappears. The article doesn’t really describe why, but effectively: once I added this to every subform, speed went back to normal!

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• Add Notes/Domino 6 and 7 Forum to IE7/Firefox
• Add Notes/Domino 8 Forum to IE7/Firefox
• Add Notes/Domino 8.5 Forum to IE7/Firefox
• Add Notes/Domino XPages Forum to IE7/Firefox

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It turns out that this is actually pretty easy to fix if you set the correct margin before inserting the subform.

F.e. the following settings

result in

Once the subform is inserted, altering the margin settings has no effect any more, so if the subform is not positioned as intended, just remove the subform, adjust the margin and reinsert the subform.

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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.

Cables cables

But wait! There are other connectivity options! I can connect the good old analog way with RCA. I found an headphone-jack-to-RCA-connector (from Belkin) to connect my iPod/iPhone with my car stereo. Downside: I have to connect it manually, and some ugly white cable is coming out of the glove compartment. Looking further, I found there’s a bluetooth-to-jack connection from Belkin as well. But that would mean: buying another connector, and I read somewhere that sound quality only is so-so.

Then I read on a forum the idea of using Airplay (Airtunes?) in-car. In the near future manufacturers will have solutions for this, but meanwhile I wanted to use the Airport Express I have at home (unused).

Setup

1. Setup your Airport Express in Airport Configuration program; let it Create a wireless network
2. Find a power convertor that converts the 12V of your car to 220V (or whatever is appropriate in your country). I bought this one from Belkin (around 40 euros).
3. I put it in the glove compartment and let it power the Airport Express. The only cable coming out is the cable to the 12V in the mid console of the car. Luckily enough a black cable.
4. Connect the Airport Express with the aux or RCA-connection of your car and set this as the audio source on your car stereo.
5. Connect your iPod/iPhone to your wireless network you created on the Airport Express.
6. Start playing your music and select you want to use Airplay for playing back the music.

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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.

The upgrade

One day, there was the decision to upgrade to version 8. Everything was upgraded, only the RR remained the “old version”. Although on the outside it doesn’t look that different, there must have been changes underneath, because lots of stuff suddenly went wrong.

So we had to upgrade the database to version 8 as well. Downside: the changes that were built in over the years had to be sacrificed for now. But take away functionality and Unhappy Customers is what you get. We’re now in the process of listing up the features they want, but I’m not willing to work the same way anymore.

How we would work

The initial idea was to simply adapt the new Resource Reservations database again, and keep track of every single small change. Of course, that would mean we have to implement these changes all over again in a next version of the RR database.

After some research, we came to the conclusion that others walked this route before us: they use a database, separate from the RR database, in which they do the reservations, then “publish” to the RR database.

In this database all possible requests from the users can be developed, without infecting the original RR database. After an upgrade, the only thing you need to check is if the “publish” code still functions. Of course, this doesn’t change the way people book rooms via their calendars.

What about you?

What’s your approach? Do you work the same way? Any downsides to this approach? Any example code on publishing? Remarks? According to me, this is a problem faced by a lot of companies, but there’s no real existing solution for this.

Update: some extra clues in the forums

• According to this post reservations are created from calendar entries by sending a mail and you can learn a lot of fields to use by intercepting a reservation mail.
• This post shows how to create a reservation with LotusScript (thank you, Shawn Conlin!)

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… 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…

The solution that worked for me

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.

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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.

Oh, and what if I replace spaces by  ? This always works, right? Wrong! It doesn’t do anything, the lines are still wrapped… Ah, but what about  ? Nope. Some magic spell? Cursing? Nope.

The solution: ALT-255, Space’s almost identical twin

So I took my bag and went out on the World Wide Web to see if there’s something simular to the nbsp. I turns out that there’s the almost mythical character ALT-255, somewhere even called The Hidden Dragon. It looks, feels, tastes like a space, but it isn’t, it’s a space with real glue capabilities!

Just replace your spaces with ALT-255′s like this:

@ReplaceSubstring(YourValue;" ";@Char(255))

with the following result:

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To be more specific, the limit is 32K for fields with IsSummary flag on, and 64K for other fields (I did some extra research ). But, more importantly, what field should you look for? What can cause this overflowing fieldbucket? Aim for a @DbLookup or @DbColumn in a computed or computed for display field.

I ran into this error and it took me a couple of hours to find the cause. Just to realize that I had this error before. Time to document this . In my case a computed for display field was used as a source for choices in keyword lists. The field did a lookup for a huge list of people and this list became too big. I solved it by splitting it up in different fields, then joining these values again in the choices of the keyword list.

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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!

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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…

How does it look?

It could look like this:

The basics

The months in this example are generated in a computed value with @Formula. The computed value is marked as passthru html.

I used a multivalue field CostMonth and with a @For-loop I wrapped a link around every value.

The link is actually a link to a JavaScript function in the JSHeader that presses a button for us. Something like:

function clickRow(row) {
	document.forms[0].myButton.click();
}

Don’t forget to give the name/id “myButton” to that button. The button itselfs can hold formula, lotusscript or whatever your heart desires.

I used linebreaks <br> for new lines, I tested with <br/> as well, this didn’t work. But, we’re not there yet, this is the result so far:

Hey, that’s not the font I want! That’s not the color I like!

Changing font, color and interlines

I tried css to change the look of the links, but I had little to no success. Alternative: surrounding the link tags with <font> tags. This can alter the font color and font face.

Oh, but there was trouble, there were headaches, there was darkness! If I put the font tag outside of the link tag, the color didn’t change (because it took the default link color over. If I put it inside of the link tag, the interline is huge (and that makes sense, because the font is still wrong outside of the link tag).

So, what I did was changing the size and face outside of the link tag, and changing the color in the link tag. The code becomes:

Taking it further

Buttons can be generated with passthru as well, here’s an example:

Images can be used as well, but this is a bit more cumbersome, because the images will need the http task to be shown, so I don’t really recommend this.

© Martin Vereecken for BizzyBee's BizzyThoughts, 2008. | Permalink | 12 comments

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I have no idea what will happen next…

1. “Yes” will move the files?
2. “Yes” will randomly move or copy the files?
3. “No” will copy the files?
4. “No” will do the same as yes?
5. “No” will stop the move/copy process?
6. “No” will stop the operating system?

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)

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The other day, I read somewhere on a forum that you can easily reconnect the mouse just by clicking the button a few times. Duh… how simple is that? I realized that I never really did this, I just moved the mouse around in circles without result…

© Martin Vereecken for BizzyBee's BizzyThoughts, 2008. | Permalink | 5 comments

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It’s like cleaning up the toys of your child, turning your back, look again and… welcome back, toys! That’s probably what Lotus meant with Lotus Domino Everyplace .

Today I had this: double text properties!

It’s like the little gnomes that do the icon arrangements were thinking: “You can never have enough text markup!”.

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The round buttons, the orange gradient and the blue match the new client very well.

Unfortunately, for us, developers, these are features that are out of reach to build in regular views and forms at this moment. Even in the mailbox the buttons on the memoform have “normal” looks.

I tried to get as close to this “ideal” as possible and this is the result.

How were the buttons created?

First you’ll need to download the background images. Note that the R8actionbutton.jpg needs to be set to images across=4 in the image resource properties.

These are the Action Bar settings I applied:

• Bar Height: fixed, 30 pixels.
• Color: RGB 231,233,240.
• Image: r8actionbar.jpg, repeat horizontally.
• Border: style=solid, color=RGB 169,192,215, 2px bottom (other borders=0).
• Button Size Height: fixed size, 30 pixels.
• Button Options: display border=on mouse over, internal margins=0px.
• Button Background: color=RGB 240,240,240, image=r8actionbutton.jpg
• Font: default sans serif, 9pt, plain, RGB 0,64,128

That’s it! If you see ways to make it a closer match, let me know!

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1. Go to menu Application – Refresh Design…
2. Select the correct server.
3. Wait…
4. Repeat for the next databases.

This is ok, as long as you don’t need to do this that often, and as long as there aren’t a lot of databases to refresh. If you’re like me, you also have databases with a lot of dependencies, different servers, development/test/production,… and then a little change you’d like to deploy ends in an RSI nightmare (t.i. if you didn’t drop dead of boredom).

There’s also the extremely dangerous combination of boring, repetitive work and precision expected.

There must be an easier way

Now enter the world of Refresh Divine: do this once:

1. Build a design refresh profile for each application you’d like to refresh.
2. Set the refresh order for the databases of the same database family.

After initial setup, you just have to grab a cup of coffee, select the refresh design profiles you’d like to apply and press a button!

Origin

The idea existed for a longer time, and was born out of frustration. At certain moments I need to refresh the design of up to 30 databases (who all have dependencies). This is a time consuming, boring and dangerous job (if you select the wrong server, you can screw up the design).

Then I found the C API solution from the Breaking Par website (this is probably there for ages, they talk about Notes R5.03! Breaking Par doesn’t even exist anymore…).

I used and changed this code to create a tool around it.

DbRecompiler

But wait, there’s already an existing alternative! After developing half of my tool, I wondered: “Hey, maybe there’s something on OpenNTF already existing!” (I know, a late reflex) and indeed, there is: DbRecompiler does the same thing and much more.

But there’s a different approach: where DbRecompiler targets for more options and features, my goal was simplicity, ease-of-use, easy to setup. Use it for 1 minute and you know how it works!

Still here? Hurry to OpenNTF Refresh Divine project page then!

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I needed a way to see if an agent is running. To my knowledge, there’s no such thing possible with “normal” Notes-programming (is there such thing is normal programming in Notes?).

Collegue Jo Van Eynde (all credits go to him) came with the idea of sending a console command and capturing the output the console returns. Brilliant!

If the agent manager isn’t doing anything, it’s just idle, otherwise it returns something like Running agent ‘x’. Once you know that, it gets really simple.

Here’s the code:

Sub Click(Source As Button)
	Dim ConsoleReturn As String
	Dim StringToFind As String
	Dim AgentName As String
	Dim session As New NotesSession
	'Specify the server to check
	ConsoleReturn = session.SendConsoleCommand("<Servername>","sh ta")
	'Specify the agent to check
	AgentName="<AgentToCheck>"
	StringToFind="Running agent '"+AgentName+"'"
	Dim array1(0) As String
	Dim array2(0) As String
	Dim array3(0) As String
	Dim ret As Variant
	array1(0) =ConsoleReturn
	array2(0) = StringToFind
	array3(0) = ""
	ret = Replace(array1, array2, array3)
	If ret(0)<>consoleReturn Then
		Msgbox |Agent "|+agentName+|" RUNS!|,64,"Check Agent"
	Else
		Msgbox |Agent "|+agentName+|" DOESN'T run!|,64,"Check Agent"
	End If
End Sub

The only thing I don’t check in my code, is the database name, so you if your agents have the same name across different databases, it might be another agent in another database that is running (instead of the one you wanted to check).

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There were some restrictions though:

• Currently we are running on Domino 6.5.
• I prefer a free solution
• It needs to be simple and do this specific task.

My choice

After checking out the feedback I got, and doing some tests with the open source solutions, I preferred Database Alert from Thomas Adrian. Thanks Thomas, for developing this neat solution!

It is a very simple and clean application that gives you some alert possibilities for databases.

The one I need is:

You can set the agent you want to watch, the warning trigger (for how long didn’t it run before you have to panic?), the warning interval (send mails every day) and who you want to warn (preferably somebody else )

The Others

• Agent Registry from Teamstudio: apparently a new baby from Teamstudio, ready to be born. I like Teamstudio’s products (we use them a lot with our current customer), but since I know the products are (relatively) expensive, I didn’t try it.
• Agent Monitor (DAF) from Joerg Reck on OpenNTF: I tried this one, but I didn’t manage to get it running. I know… I assume I didn’t give it enough time, I’m a bit of an impatient being .
• GSX Monitor from GSX: I didn’t try this one either, but it doesn’t seem to do the required monitoring. Also (my opinion), to me the interface looked a bit busy. But then again, I’m not an administrator .
• DDM, a standard Domino feature. Unfortunately new since version 7.
• PowerTools from Help Software: sorry, no agent monitor there, but a nice bundle of little handy tools, so it looks.
• Essential Agent Master from RPR Wyatt: this one seems the closest to what I needed, but… they charge money (nothing wrong with that, but I found a free thingy, remember?). However, I hope to test it one day…
• AgentEZ from Ytria: it doesn’t monitor what I want, but it gives me a clean look on my agents and a lot more possibilities than Notes Designer. I can sign a group of agents all at once, see logs, set properties “en masse” etc. I like that! As always, prevention is the best way of dealing with problems (that way you may not even need monitoring) and this one helps here.

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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?

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In the example below, can you tell what cells are editable?

It’s obvious! And it’s easy to achieve: I just played with color columns: to the left of the editable column: color value 225:225:225:0:0:0 (light gray background) and to the right of the editable column: 255:255:255:0:0:0 (reset to white background)

In this example, I also played with a status change system that was based on the star rating article of Chris Blatnick:

When you click the project status icon, it changes to the next level. Normally, this changes from none to red to yellow to green, so you only have to click once in most cases.

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For my backups I rely on my Airport Extreme that has an external usb harddisk connected to it, my Time Machine. I had some troubles with it earlier, but Apple did a good job fixing the issues here.

And printing? I bought myself an Airport Express some months ago (so this is still the non-n-version) for connecting my laserprinter and color inkjet. Problem: there shall only be one (meaning that you can only connect one printer to the Express). I experimented with an usb-hub, but one of two printers is not recognized then.

The only way for it to work seems:

1. Connect the two printers separately and install the printer drivers.
2. After that, when you want to print to one of the printers: select that printer in the print dialog, and manually switch the printers in the usb port.

Not the most elegant way of working, but it avoids you have to plug in the printers to the usb ports of your portable. In the n-version of the Express, usb-hubs seem to be supported (so I’m suffering from the old disease of buying new stuff some months too early :-S)

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