Lotushints

…yeah, you noticed… There won’t be a post this week. Enjoy your holidays.

In parts 1 and 2, we looked at exporting forms to DXL and then importing them back. In this short article,we will look at a simple form that will allow users to assemble their own web form.
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Ok. So this post is totally out of line. Be sure that it wouldn’t found it’s space up here if it wasn’t for it’s all around usability. Microsoft Expressions SuperView help you see how your website would behave in different browsers. You can read Expressions SuperView blog for further details or download and try it out. Beware, it is still in beta mode.

In order to display multiple banners in single spot (and to keep web site from becoming tacky), you will need some sort of client side script that will display first one banner, then the second one etc. This is called banner animator (or even ad animator). In this case, the functionality is written in JavaScript, with some help of HTML (for element positioning) and CSS (for element appearance).
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In the second part of Custom web forms series I will try to cover import of simple form to Notes database from DXL file. If you wonder how to export a form to DXL, please check Part 1: Exporting Form into DXL.
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The one thing that in my opinion always lacked in Lotus Notes was the ability for users without designer access (and much knowledge of HTML) to build their own custom forms. One might argue that it is not that big of a deal and that it would take an experienced developer approximately one hour to create and test such a form. However, developers usually have more important work to do and this is an hour unnecessary spent.

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State pattern is probably most used in review cycles. The definition says:

State pattern allows an object to appear as it can change its class by altering its behaviour and state.

What are you talking about?

Well, imagine you are in need to build a bug tracking database.  Bug reports in basics have four states. First they are unassigned until someone is solving them. When they are taken over, they become assigned, specifying that someone is already working on them. After bug fix has been produced, it is a good practice to send it to testing. Then it is up to QA to confirm that bug fix is complete or whether it is not.

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There are two rules I always respect and usually follow:

1. If a code compiles and seems to work in first try, there is something terribly wrong with it.
2. Never, ever, under no circumstances, move anything in production on Friday.

I urge you not to break one of these rules, no matter how confident you feel and under no circumstances.

Let me tell you a little story. I have developed a new feature for our renewed web site. This was over two weeks ago and on test system, it was working like a charm. Everyone liked it and there was no bugs found. So, I moved my code to production system. All fine and well, as without content and proper linkage, this feature would not be visible to web users until we decided to allow it. As I said, the thing missing was a content. That wasn’t my job and I paid no heed to it. So on Friday, a co-worker assigned for content gave me a green light. Now, I was feeling overconfident and despite warnings in my head and by my fellow developers, I decided to go with it.

Big mistake. I spent next 4 hours (and some overtime as well), working feverishly to remove bugs that were result of the content. It is not that content was wrong, but rather that it was not tested enough. And for a cherry on a cake, I received a call from project manager on my way home. Apparently he wasn’t aware we are going live. Well not on Friday anyway.

Lesson learned. Never, ever, under no circumstances, move anything in production on Friday. Moving on.

When I was assigned to rebuild company’s web site for the second time in 7 or 8 years, I have decided that it is probably the time to implement some modularity to the database. First in line were sidebars. Why? Well, despite “awesome” notes rich text to HTML rendering, web content was always contained in rich text field on a document, making it very customizable. On the other hand, sidebars were always subforms that were then connected to the document via a field (user specified subforms name). This was customizable, but regular content editors did not have designer access to the database. Thus, all modifications were relayed to us, developers. And there were quite a bit of modifications. I will pitch you my idea of solution to this problem.

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Have you ever wondered how you could call already written and quite useful Java classes in your LotusScript code? To me, this moment was, when I was trying to implement other department’s code into my own. Unfortunately I wasn’t skilled enough in ways of object development, LS2J  and googling back then to actually figure out that was possible. I remember thinking: “IBM implemented Java in Lotus Notes, they must have done some adaptor for it.”, but was unable to figure it out. Until couple of years back, when I got a Holy shit! moment, finding this blog post.

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