Mick Moignard's Blog

After day 2 of Tim & Matt's xPages workshop, my head's starting to spin a little.  

We moved forward pretty well today; the class as a whole got quite a lot further than was expected at the start of the day.  So far we've created a multi-page application, and used several custom controls (which are the xPages equivalent of a subform) to generate re-usable components, put those on the xPages, and today we basically completed all the twiddly bits that make it all tie together, and operate as a whole.  

 We've added code that reads Notes data from views, and also writes data back to Notes from an xPage, using a form as the mechanism for setting fields.  That's been done in one case using a ComputeWithForm, and in another using some Javascript to create the document and add form and other data fields to it.  Along the way we've done a lot of partial refresh (=Ajax) pieces, and noted how slickly the application refreshes pieces of the page - that's even included type ahead in fields with the type-ahead driven off of Notes views, again.  Add to that some Java integration - which because of an apparent Designer bug we had to type in twice - and even played with the idea of dynamically, in a button that runs on the client, dynamically generate server-side script and run it.    

We've also done some stuff that appeared to be completely broken; adding a theme made a complete mess of the app, but recovery was just a matter of removing the reference to the theme.   The workshop notes need a little work, because some of it just didn't work, and in the area of a repeat control, didn't make a lot of sense, until we realised that a reference that we named friendCollection was actually to each row of the repeat and not a reference to the whole control; then all worked well.

Looking forward now to completing the session tomorrow, and then having the chance to use what I've learned against something else.   All in with some Quickr work and a Connections install that I'm doing next week.....  

By the way, if you have an 8.5 server installed, create a discussion database on it, using the 8.5 discussion template,a nd go have a look at it with a browser - it's quite a good example of some of the power that xPages has.    Tim still has spare places for the December rerun: email hurtec at uk.ibm.com for detail and a reservation.