Mick Moignard's Blog

Today we got into soem more advanced and rather leery stuff.   We hooked up a LotusScript Notes agent to the Postsave event of an xPage - which provides a way to hook up existing code to an xPages app, code that might have been written originally for , say, a WQS agent.   We used @formulas on a Notes for,m to populate xPages fields with default values, and also used a from field Input Translation to format the field as the data was being saved away; and while we did these things the relationship between an xPage and the use of a form to write Notes documents from data entered on an xPage really came over well.  Best of all was using a repeat control on an xPage to generate a dynamic table that wrote data back to multivalue fields on a single Notes document.  That was pretty cool.  

Also reasonably cool was the idea of using some XSLT to  transform the DXL of a Notes view design into xPage XML using XSLT that was provided as part of the course material.  Once we got over a character-set issue (edit the exported file and save as UTF-8), that worked well.  Maybe Lotus should issue that XSLT as part of the shipping product, and potentially include something that translates forms to xPage XML as well.

We also explored putting HTML and Javascript directly into the xPage via computed fields and escaping conversion; that kinds didn't really work for me, but the point wsas made that it's possible, just like adding passthru HTML to a form - but I predict that you're not going to need to do this very often, because of the power of xPages in general.   Lastly we also explored the functionality that lets you export all the labels and literals from the app for translation, and include them back in afterwards. In use the server asks the browser what the preferred language is, and off you go.  Might not suit all tastes and apps, because it relies on browser settings rather than a stored user preference, but the opportunity is there.  

So, a good session and a really promising product.  We finished off with a Sametime voice call to one of the xPages development team in Dublin, who filed us in on a a few questions - such as how some of the session and application scope variables cope with clustered servers - this is supposed to be OK. No news on a new LS class browser, though.  We did ask "the question" about xPage execution in the client, but I think I'm supposed to kill you if I tell you what the answer was.  So I'm not.  Not now, anyway.