DXL round-tripping joy

Yesterday I posted about some problems I was having with DXL round-tripping to edit a form design. Well Nathan got in contact with me after that and gave me some good ideas on how to debug the problem. But one thing he said really rang the alarm bells: “DXL is at it’s flakiest when dealing with lots of passthru HTML and Javascript hotspots”. Of course all of our forms in IdeaJam use a lot of passthru HTML, so I decided to go back to the old R4 style of developing, if your form isn’t working, junk it and start again. Lo and behold, once I had rebuilt the forn being far more careful about what got the passthru HTML flag against it, my DXL changes worked properly.

So two lessons learned here, firstly, treat DXL as you used to treat hide formulae in tables in the olden days… very delicately. And secondly, make sure that Nathan’s around to help when you have a problem!

June 27, 2008 by 2

DXL round-tripping woes

I’ve spent the better part of today working on adding new features for the next released of IdeaJam. Most of the feature requests we are getting are in the form of extra configuration, one of which was to be able to control the number of rows shown on view pages. Most of this is pretty simply done using the &count url parameter, but there are a couple of places where I had to get a little more serious. Basically we have an embedded view in a couple of forms, and there is no programatic way of getting at the “Lines to display” property (that I know of). No problem, thought I, I’ll just go and edit the form design with DXL whenever an administrator wants to change the number of rows. It’s not ideal but we can live with that. And indeed it is pretty easy to get at the DXL and edit the embedded view property (kudos for Ben’s post from 2004 for getting me going there!).

So all fine and dandy then? Well no, whenever I update the form design like this I get three random line breaks inserted above the embedded view. When I open the form with Designer they are not there and as soon as I resave it they go again. But what it means is that my lovely new feature will have to go on the back burner until we get proper round tripping of DXL. So if you haven’t already, please vote for Rocky’s idea in the absence of anyone else to beat up on:


June 26, 2008 by 2

UKLUG calls for abstracts, sponsors and registrations

Now that ILUG 2008 is over, it’s time to shift focus onto UKLUG until September.

You may know that we announced registration during the closing session of ILUG this year, well the sign ups are coming in thick and fast but we wanted to make sure that everyone knew it was on, so have a read of Warren’s blog entry and then make sure you are booked in for what will be a great two days.

Then if you’re interested in sponsoring or speaking, drop an email to info@uklug.info.

June 26, 2008 by 0

Welcome a new Lotus Blogger

If you were at ILUG this year then you’ll probably have met Mark Myers who presented a session with Ben Poole amongst other things. Well Mark’s been writing a blog for a while but has never actually told anyone about it before, so if you’re looking for a mix of Domino dev and admin, Linux and fencing then anewchance.co.uk is the place for you!

June 18, 2008 by 1

ILUG 2008 Conference Evaluation

Hopefully, if you attended ILUG this year you will have received an email about the Conference Evaluation. We’ve already had a great response with people taking the time to fill it in, but if you haven’t please make sure that you do as the speakers and sponsors really appreciate any feedback that you have to give. Part of the remit for ILUG is that speakers can try new things without too much risk as everyone is just there to learn and network, so if you think a session worked really well, or indeed could do with some improvement, let us know.

I should also give a shout out to the metaSurvey project on OpenNTF which we used to build the conference evaluation. Yet again OpenNTF has saved me time and effort (too late for the hair unfortunately). Originally I thought that I’d need to write a whole new application, but with this cool app which metaLogic have open sourced, I could just fill in the questions and publish it. Very, very easy.

June 16, 2008 by 2

LinkJam beta started

Over the weekend we applied the final finishing touches to the LinkJam beta site and notified the beta testers about how to log in etc. So over the next few weeks we will be testing out the features and stability of the application with a view to releasing it in the middle of July. In the meantime please feel free to have a look around and log any ideas into the LinkJam IdeaSpace on IdeaJam.

All of the same IdeaJam goodness in terms of customisation and maintenance will be available for LinkJam, and as ever this is a version 1.0 product, we have a lot of features to be added in future versions.

June 16, 2008 by 0

UKLUG Registration Open

In amongst the ILUG mayhem last week, Paul announced that registration for UKLUG in September is now open. This year the conference is going to have space for 250 people and run over two days in central London. It promises to be a really interesting couple of days, and there will be great networking opportunities to meet the UK Lotus community. So get over to the site and register quickly while there is still space.

June 11, 2008 by 2

Back in the land of the online

I finally got home from ILUG at midnight last night. Warren, Bill and I drove back from Dublin with a stop over in Belfast on Sunday night at Pauls with the AV kit to return. By the Saturday evening I think we had all pretty much hit the wall so we just had a couple of quiet drinks along the way, no major excitement.

Now looking back to ILUG week itself, it was pretty manic the whole time. We had a huge amount of help from all sorts of people but Kerr Rainey deserves special mention, and also Mark Myers who helped out with room monitoring for a couple of days.

While we were driving back from Belfast to Edinburgh yesterday Bill asked what was my favourite bit of the week, I really struggled to come up with just one thing so I thought I’d put together a list and see what anyone else wants to add…

– The amazing people who turned up on Tuesday to help with bag stuffing and anything else that needed doing, it was really hard work, but at least the Malteser cake which Leah brought made up for it
– The conference venue staff, especially the AV guys who were still there on Tuesday night at midnight when I left and were back in before eight o’clock the next morning to continue helping us.
– Kerr Rainey deserves a special mention for helping Warren and me out with all the roadie type work, including all sorts of odd things like running extra long VGA cabling through ceilings which really went above and beyond the call of duty.
– ILUG marked the first time I had done any public speaking for a long, long time and, bizarrely, I actually enjoyed it. Especially the Speed Geeking, it really is quite challenging to get your content into the 5 minutes and then repeat it 12 times in an hour. (by the way, several people asked for the little database that I demo’d, so I’ll make sure that it makes it into the download area which I need to write this week which will be available once you have filled in the conference evaluation form. Paul will announce the site once it has been written and tested 🙂 )
– Unfortunately I didn’t get to spend much time in the sponsors area but whenever I was down there it seemed busy, Speed Sponsoring was a great success by all accounts (that’s sponsors and delegates) and I was really pleasantly surprised at how well attended the sponsor sessions were. Looks like people got a lot of value from them.
– Finally, it’s really worth singling out Paul, Eileen and Warren for special thanks. I’m not sure if people know quite how much effort goes into the organisation of such a big event in their spare time, well pick a number and double it. All of the green tee shirt brigade helped out but those three in particular really put in an enourmous amount of effort.

Now I really need to get up to speed with the real world, there’s been lots of good news about the iPhone yesterday which I am just catching up on, oh and I suppose I really should do some work at some point, we have a beta of LinkJam to get out after all.

June 10, 2008 by 0

Let IBM know what we want from the new Designer client

I am not on the Design Partner program and so have no direct contact with the Lotus development team. So the next best thing I can do is post an idea in the new 8.5 IdeaJam site that I hope will get a lot of votes and show how people feel about the code editors in the new Designer client:


May 31, 2008 by 2