Sixty not out

Today I uploaded the 60th video to xpages101.net. It's taken me over 18 months to get this far and there are no plans to stop adding more content. In fact with the announcement of the 8.5.3 release date, there are many more areas which need to be covered. Expect to see a rash of new videos over the next few weeks.

I thought I'd post some of the stats for the site so far.

• First video posted: February 11th 2010
• Total length of videos uploaded: 11 hours 15 minutes
• Total size of videos uploaded: 3.17gb
• Shortest video: 2 minutes 7 seconds - how to run a local HTTP console window
• Longest video: 25 minutes 12 seconds - Dojo Mobile Controls in 8.5.3

In the last couple of months I've had the 250th subscriber sign up for the site, and more are joining weekly. Since the site was re-designed earlier this year it's also easier to submit your own lesson ideas if there's something which I've not covered yet and each of the lessons has a comments section to clarify points or add you're own thoughts on the lesson.

And finally, to celebrate the 60th lesson being uploaded, here's an offer for you. If you use the coupon code "60notout" at checkout, you'll get a £60 discount on your purchase. Just head on over to xpages101.net to get started.

Dojo Charts and IE

I've just spent the better part of three days working on a suite of Dojo Charts for an application. They are usually pretty easy to get going and look as good, if not better than a lot of the flash charting tools out there. But, and there's always a but isn't there, getting the charts working in IE can be a real challenge with very little in the way of guidance.

So here are three tips which I shall pass on learned through bitter experience over the last few days...

It may well look as though you can initialise your charts using in line JavaScript and, indeed, it will work absolutely fine in Firefox, Safari, Chrome and other "modern" web browser. Not so much with IE. So break your initialisation code into a function and call it from the either the onClientLoad client side event in the XPage or using XSP.addOnLoad(init) depending on your preference.

This was a weird one, and took me ages to find. But one of my charts requires the user to select some options and then I fire a partial refresh of the page to generate the JSON data which populates the chart. But if the data which is returned by the AJAX request (the partial update) begins with JavaScript which needs to be evaluated then you may find in IE that the code is not being evaluated. So the JSON objects I was generating were not available for use in the chart. The solution, and it still grates me that I had to do this, was to add an empty, hidden div at the top of the area which is being refreshed, then the JSON data will be processed correctly.

Finally another thing which I had to do to make my code less efficient was re-write the way that I was generating some of the JSON data. One of the charts has multiple, variable numbers of series of data depending upon what the user selects. So I was generating each series of data to be a JSON object inside an array of JSON objects that I just looped through when building the chart. But no, it seems IE doesn't like accessing multi dimensional arrays of JavaScript when building charts, so instead I had to create a different variable for each JSON data series and reference them using evaluates.

So the lesson from all of this is that, a) do your initial development in Firefox or Chrome, b) never, ever under estimate the amount of time you'll need to spend getting the bloody thing working in IE.

LUG Template available on OpenNTF

At UKLUG this year, Warren announced that we would be making the template which we use to run the online elements of the LUG available on OpenNTF. Well I finally got around to making the template and uploading the bits and pieces onto OpenNTF (actually a surprisingly easy process!).

Anyway, if you're interested then you can download the template from here: LUG Template

As Warren mentioned, we're looking for help. At the moment there is no documentation at all, so it can be a little painful to get set up, just ask Chris, or Mitch or Stuart or any of the other people who are already using it for their own LUGs! The app itself is simple enough, but it registers people in different DA databases, integrates into other elements on your server, sends email etc etc.

So if you can help then please drop me a line and I will put together a list of elements that we need help with. Of course I'm also looking for help with bug fixing and improving various elements of the application as I've not been able to devote as much time as I would like to it this year.

Finally, I'd just like to give a big hand to Warren. I suspect the amount of work that he puts in to UKLUG (and ILUG) goes rather underestimated and it was him who drove the original development of the application and then made the decision for it to be given back to the Lotus community.

XPages Guru Webinar

I'm very honoured to have been asked by Chris Blatnick to be involved in a webinar running on 1st June where several of the "Gurus of XPages" from around the world (plus myself) will be talking about our favourite technology.

You can sign up for the event here.

The rough agenda for the hour long session looks like this:

What is XPages? - Matt White
Case Studies - Discussion database, XTalk, etc. - Bruce Elgort 
Benefits of XPages - Matt White
Why should I transition? - Tim Tripcony
Roadmap to XPages (How do I get from here to there?) - Chris Toohey
What resources are out there? - David Leedy
Q & A

XPages101 LS11 discount

As the annual pilgrimage to Florida for Lotusphere begins, I thought it would be worth mentioning a discount for XPages101 which I'll be offering for the next 3 weeks.

Use the coupon code "ls11" at checkout and get a 33% discount!

It's coming up to a year since I first launched the site and in that time I've uploaded 37 lessons which run to more than 7 hours of content and well over 2gb of movies. There are many more lessons planned over the coming weeks and months.

So if you feel like it's time to get into XPages, or you're just looking for a bit of a helping hand with some of the more complex tasks in Domino Designer then hopefully my videos will be able to help you. Check them out.