Categories
Mobile Podcast XPages

NotesIn9: 109 Selecting Multiple Documents with XPages Mobile Controls

This show starts my attempt at a little “XPages Mobile Madness”.  This is a new event for NotesIn9.  All it really means is I’m going to make a concerted effort to get a bunch of Mobile focused shows on.  I only have so many in my back pocket so I’m looking for help!

In today’s show I get another amazing contributor.  Richard Sharpe of Teamstudio comes on and shows us how to select multiple documents from a repeat control inside an XPages Mobile Controls Application.  Great stuff!

Note: I did a similar show to this way way back in NotesIn9 25.  In that show I demo’s how to select items in a repeat for a “Normal” XPages application. So if interested in this for a NON mobile solution then you might want to check that out.  http://notesin9.com/index.php/2011/04/01/notesin9-025-selecting-documents-from-a-repeat-control/

Categories
Mobile XPages

jQuery Mobile Seems incompatible with XPages in Domino 9.0

So it’s no secret that I’m doing a lot of XPages Web Development for iPads and I have a complete love – hate relationship with XPages Mobile controls.  In some ways they’re great.  In some ways they are not so great at all.  Not all of that is XPages fault – though some is – but some of the problem is in the Dojo that drives the mobile controls.

So I really want to abandon Mobile Controls, if nothing else the whole single page App is just really really hard to debug.  If you navigate to a page you can’t EASILY view source for instance.  You need to catch it with a tool like firebug.

Anyway, so I found this project that I really wanted to use.  https://github.com/commadelimited/jQuery-Mobile-Bootstrap-Theme

In theory it’s a marriage of Twitter Bootstrap and a css “theme” that makes some elements look like you would on a mobile device.  Ideally I’d love to have the mobile look and feel since I think it’s easier for the users then a glorified web page, but I’m desperate to get to normal XPages and away from these virtual pages.  Even if the fancy transitions are lost I don’t really care any more.

So it seems it’s not just a CSS framework like I thought but it does require jQuery Mobile.  Ok – I gave it a try and guess what.  It didn’t work.  not at all.  The mobile goodies would NOT render!

Until I completely disabled Dojo!

Disabling Dojo is not an option for me.  I just can’t hand code all that stuff.  It’s not going to happen.  I’m going to be using XPages I want to USE XPages.  But why didn’t it work?  Well I had to turn to the jQuery Master himself – Mark Roden.  He took a look at it for me which I greatly appreaciated!

We’re not sure, but we think there’s a conflict between Dojo and jQuery Mobile with the “data-role” attribute.  I guess both frameworks make use of that and Dojo 1.8 grabs it first and shuts jQuery out. If I downgraded Dojo I BELIEVE it would work but that’s not an option for me.=

Apparantly I’m not the only one with this problem.

That’s what I think I know at least.  If anyone knows something else please chime in!

Personally I’m not sure what to do.  XPages Mobile controls are difficult and missing things like a bottom TabBar, though I believe the redPill company has solved that problem.  I believe Kendo UI uses virtual pages as well.  JQuery Mobile seems like you need to drop Dojo.

I think I might try the Twitter Bootstrap 3 Release Candidate.  Not really sure though.

Kinda annoying actually…

Categories
Mobile Notes In 9 XPages

NotesIn9 108: XPages Mobile Controls Problem and Solution

This is a rush show.  I didn’t mean to make this show at this time, but it looks like I solved a problem that has been frustrating me for a while so I had to take a quick break and document it and get this out.

The problem is with trying to do a refresh in the onChange event of an edit control in the confines of XPages Mobile Controls.  I’ve done this before in a production app, but recently I tried making a new version of that app, starting from scratch, and I couldn’t get the same behavior.

Really really frustrating stuff.

Hopefully, if you’re working with Mobile controls this will help you.

Categories
Uncategorized

Getting the most out of XPages Performance

Nathan T. Freeman just posted a very interesting article on XPages Performance.

Highly recommend you check it out.

http://nathantfreeman.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/xpages-performance-pro-tips/

Categories
Notes In 9 Podcast XPages

NotesIn9 107: Launch Attachments from a View Control

In this show Steve Zavocki, a new contributor and a CUSTOMER, comes on the show to give a demo on using the view controller to launch attachments.

He blogs at http://notesspeak.blogspot.com.  Don’t miss his about page with details how he got started with XPages.  Great story there.

In this show he and I mention Stephan Wissel’s blog post on working with Attachments.  That link is here:

http://www.wissel.net/blog/d6plinks/SHWL-86QKNM

Thanks!

UPDATE:  Don’t miss Steve’s blog post about this technique.

http://notesspeak.blogspot.com/2013/02/how-to-launch-attachment-from-view.html

Categories
Java Notes In 9 Podcast XPages

NotesIn9 106: Intro to Java Controller Classes

In this show Jesse Gallagher, a great new contribitor, comes on to give us an over view of using Java Controller Classes to help seperate your business logic from your XPage.  By moving your logic outside of the XPage you get much cleaner XML source for your XPage.

If you’re new to the thought of using Java inside XPages, I’d suggest don’t focus on the actual syntax that Jesse’s using here but the overall concepts.  This is very similar to using Lotusscript custom classes to hold your business logic so you have cleaner agents and view buttons.

Hope you like it.

Categories
Notes In 9 Podcast XPages

NotesIn9 105: Introduction to SSJS Debugger

In this show an Fredrik Norling, and IBM Champion and awesome develolper, comes on NotesIn9 for the very FIRST time!

Frederik, is going to give us a really good and indepth demo on using the new SSJS debugger of Designer 9.0.  This isn’t just a getting started, but an indepth guide on using it.  Not to be missed!

I also announce my next “event” in the show.  It’s called “XPages Mobile Madness”. Basically I want to get a bunch of mobile related shows on.  I’ll talk about this more in a seperate blog post.

Thanks for watching!

Dave

Categories
Learning XPages Notes In 9

NotesIn9 104: Viewer Question – Comboboxes

In this show I answer a question from a poster on the XPages Forum. Ursus Schneider posted that he was having a problem with Arrays (http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/xpagesforum.nsf/topicThread.xsp?action=openDocument&documentId=646EB71744203F5C85257B38006321C2)  but when he sent me a small sample to look at he had actually was having problems with working with comboboxes and partial refreshes.

So in this show I take a look at the sample I was sent and dissect it.  I’ll try and show you how it was originally coded and what the current problem that Ursus was having it.  I’ll fix that but then take a more indepth look at trying to modify the original code so it’s more on the lines of best practices.

Coding is an art, and I’m only so good at it myself, but hopefully this will be a contructive look at some possible ways to improve things via a code review.  I thank Ursus for sending me this and letting me using the discussion on the show.

One of the main reasons I wanted to do this example, was I thought pretty early on that I could work in an example that I’ve been trying to get on the show.  I wanted to demonstrate how you can return multiple values from a document from 1 SSJS function.  So instead of doing multiple lookups you might be able to do more at once.

Anyway – hope you like the show.  This should be a good one for people newish to XPages.

P.S. Theres like 3 seconds of black at the beginning of this video.  I’ve no idea what I did there.  Sorry about that.

Categories
Community Ext. Library

XPages Extension Library vs. Upgrade Pack 1

I got a question today from someone who looked at the slides that Kathy Brown and I did from IBM Connect”

while reading your presentation XPages: No experience Needed I noticed the your screenshot of the layout control differs from what is displayed here in designer.
we downloaded openntfextensions (ExtensionLibraryOpenNTF-853.20121022-1354) and installed ’em (test/-developer-server and developer-client). everything went fine and  layout control was just like shown in your presentation.dragging the layout control to the panel surface opened up the config dialog. we did some playing around but because of official ibm support for upgrade pack 1 we decided to jump on the upgrade pack train and give it a try. but it seems as if upgrade pack 1 is a little bit outdated in comparrison to openntfextensions – e.g. the layout control doesn’t show a config dialog.

would installing upgrade-pack 2 improove things and also update extensions controls like layout or do we have to stick with upgrade pack 1 and live with it?

perhaps you can help and give us a short hint. thanks in advance.

Here’s my personal opinion of Upgrade Pack vs. Ext. Library.

Always use Ext. Library.

Yes – Upgrade Pack is “Supported” by IBM but I honestly don’t know what that means.  Sure you can make a PMR but I’m not aware of IBM providing hotfixes for bug fixes for the upgrade pack.  Honestly I’m not personally aware that there will be an Upgrade Pack 2. I THINK there’s an “Upgrade Pack 2” that’s specific to Traveler. I don’t know of a second Upgrade Pack for the Ext. Library stuff for Domino 8.5.3.  I think that the path is to go Domino 9 which pretty much has it built in.  I could be wrong on those points though.

But I do know that even though Ext. Library “is not supported”, it has been getting fairly regular bug fixes and updates.  I believe Upgrade Pack 1 came out late 2011.  Just checking the OpenNTF project I can see that there were 7 releases of Ext. Library since then. Most of those releases are bug fixes I think. So to me, I think Ext. Library has much better real support.

Now I’m a developer at a private company, and we put Ext. Library on all our servers.  Honestly I’ve never downloaded or touched Upgrade Pack 1.  Granted, at my company I have the luxury of working with Declan Lynch, a top Domino admin. But even so, I can’t imagine a situation where I would lean towards Update Pack 1.

Now there is more “risk” with Ext. library in some cases.  At one point the Ext. Library changed some names and that might have caused some people some problems. We use Ext. Library heavily and I don’t think we were heavily impacted by that.  But even though something got changed, so what?  Apple, and Microsoft, and Google change “supported” things all the time.  So I don’t see a big difference here.

I hear from friends and others that they use Upgrade Pack 1 because “customers require support”. I just don’t know what that support really means.  What’s sillier is that some of the same people that run Upgrade Pack 1 for IBM support also ask how to install the experimental pieces from Ext. Library for Relational Database support etc…  That makes no sense to me.  Now they’re asking to run unsupported software in and unsuported configuration.

Domino 9.0 is being released on the 21st it seems.  That has most of the core Ext. Library built in.  My recommendation would be to move to that as soon as possible. I know we are.  I believe there will then be an Ext. Library specific to 9.0 but that’s just a guess.  I’m anxious to hear the Ext. Library plans for 9.0 myself.

It was funny when Kathy and I did that presentation.  She used Upgrade Pack 1 because as a consultant that’s more desirable to her.  I was on Ext. Library and we did see some issue as I had bug fixes that she did not. Was a bit of a pain really.  But don’t tell her that! haha

I’m blogging this in case anyone wants to comment and you can get more opinions.

Hope this helps.

Dave

Categories
Notes In 9 Podcast

NotesIn9 103: Installing Domino Designer 8.5.3

In this show John Jardin returns with a good demonstration on how to not only install the free Domino Designer, but how to actually find it on IBM’s website. He even show’s you how to get started creating a database.

Also a big Happy Birthday to a great person and NotesIn9 contributor – Mr. Russ Maher!!!