I have an xpage that allows the user to choose a customer and then order products for that customer. It's not a simple xpage that created a document, uses a view control to view it and re-edits it. It will be used on the web and in the client. How do I fill in all the data for the various fields when the user wants to look at their order for a company since there are multiple documents that make up that xpage? Is there automatic processes or do I need to do it manually?
The best method is to use multiple datasources (the Notes documents) each with a different datasource name. When saved, be sure to save each of the datasources that have a change. Also, it is helpful to mark to "ignoreRequestParameters", so each one acts independently.
I have found that using the dynamic content control useful when doing things like this, it seems to reduce the number of replication/save conflicts.
Related
Hoping someone can point me in the correct direction for an XPages application we are writing inside the Domino Client (Notes?) viewer.
I have a view of documents which is being returned, this view has categories on it, and shows fine as this in an XPage, we now apply a filter to the view to limit it to specific owners of the documents, but as soon as we apply the filter, the categories disappear, which means we are left with a long list of documewnts, but unsorted - is there any way to display a filtered view in a categorized manner, on an XPage.
Moving further down my list, I also need to be able to select these documents (and one or many owners) to send to an Lotus Agent which will then create a JSON document to be sent to our friends at DocuSign requesting signatures from the selected owners on the selected documents. I'm not sure what an Agent is yet, but that is the goal ...
Caveat: I'm not a Domino developer, so excuse me if some of the terminology is incorrect.
Categorised views are a very "Notes" construct. When you filter a view, it will only show documents, but not categories. While they are practical in the back, they are cumbersome in the UI.
There are a few design considerations how to tame them in a webUI. However if your users love them, you might consider to flatten them out and recreate the categories in the UI (client side) only.
The actual better way for your use case: add another view that is firstly categorised by the owner and secondly by your category. Use the category filter of the view control to limit the documents to that author. This should do the trick. Eventually use one of the controls from the extension library.
For the agent: don't bother, that's "old Notes speak". An agent would be a piece of code (LotusScript or Java, but since you do web interaction: Java) that gets triggered by an event: manual, on schedule, on document create/update (with some delay).
Since you are in an XPage, you have easier options at your disposal: create a Bean that has the JSON format you need, add a method that takes a Notes document as parameter to populate it, something like public void populate(final Document doc) {...} and use e.g. the GSON library to simply marshall them to JSON (or a collection of them). The GSON library probably is on a current Domino, I put it there as part of VoP 1.0.
Then use a managed bean to talk to Dokusign. When traveling down the managed bean road is is much easier to test than trying to mess with agents.
Hope that helps and ask more questions! (Check the Learning XPages Cheatsheet too)
I want to know if I can click a button in my XPage and dynamically create a Domino View and then show it in a panel control on the same page. The reason I want to do this is because I have a categorized view and I don't want to lose category data by using full text search. So I am thinking of creating a new view dynamically and pass my search parameters, like end date or start date, into the view selection formula.
Is it possible? Any other alternative solution is also welcome.
yes you can, but you don't want to. A Domino view takes space in the database and quite some time for its first use. So you end up with a lot of views taking space and the need to adjust database space after removal. Your response times will suck big time.
Categories as shown in Notes views are no web interaction pattern, so you might want to solve a problem that actually shouldn't exist.
The preferred method for Domino application is navigation / drill down over search. But you could do a FTSearch where you add your category to the search parameters and render your results in a repeat control instead of a view control. There you have more control over the look and feel.
Whether or not it's the best solution, the answer to the immediate question about creating a view on the fly is yes: the Database class has a couple "createView" methods to allow you to create a new view, either entirely from scratch or based on a named other view. From there, you can use the "setSelectionFormula" and "createColumn" methods in the created View to build what you want. You can't do EVERYTHING with those methods, but it may be enough.
One problem you'd likely run into is ACL access: you'll need Designer rights to the database, which a normal user most likely wouldn't have. If you use the sessionAsSigner object to fetch a signer version of the DB (say, "var signerDB = sessionAsSigner.getDatabase(database.getServer(), database.getFilePath())"), you can work from there. Off the top of my head, I don't remember if you will also have to up the "Maximum Internet access" setting on the last tab of the ACL to Designer as well, but you may.
I am assuming that you are referring to the problem that exists when you choose the documents based on the category. This is something that I find highly annoying and I wish that it was possible to turn this on and off. It makes sense for embedded views, but not for much else.
What I did to solve this was to include the category value in the next column. In this way that text could still be seen, even if it was a flat view.
Alternatively, you could also look into using a repeater control and create your own way of presenting the information. This would be used instead of a (Dynamic)ViewPanel control. You could then present the information any way you wanted as long as it is returned in the viewrow set.
Happy Programming!
I am doing "traditional" lotus notes programming (same since R5) and need to implement linking between 2 document types (forms) residing in different databases.
Document of type (A) in database (A) can reference several documents of type (B) in database (B).
And document (B) should also display its relationships with document (A), as document (B) can be related to different documents (A).
We have Many to Many relationship.
At the moment it is implemented on one side only (one to many):
Form of Document (A) contains embedded view of special
"link" documents residing in database A. This link documents are created by lotusScript when user selects documents from database (B). When user clicks on an item in this embedded view, it opens document (B).
Client wants to be able to edit this relationship on any side, so that if he edits it in form (A), form (B) is updated.
Form (B) is supposed to have the same kind of embedded view or a list of associated documents of type (A)
What is the best way to implement it?
Client's infrastracture is Lotus Domino 8.5.2 + Lotus Notes 8.5.2, so theoretically, composite applications approach may be an option.
The reason why I ask this question is that as far as I understand there is no good way in Notes to embed a view from another database.
The requirement is that the database should be present on workspace to be displayed in some sort of dodgy list.
It would be great to be able to specify target database for embedded view by server and replicaID, but instead we have a weird list of random workspace databases.
The main problem is that Notes wasn't designed to handle relationships like that between databases (nor anything besides parent child relationships for that matter). So the solution will have to be a creative one.
A couple of (off-the wall, potentially awful) ideas come to mind. One is to store the references in the documents themselves, and update them whenever the document is saved. That could all be done in LotusScript, and would require searching through the other database's documents to update their references.
Upside is that the performance when reading the documents would be excellent. There'd be no issues while reading Database A if Database B was unavailable. It keeps data local to each database. The downsides include the likelihood of save conflicts and the danger that references could get out of sync if documents aren't "saved" but instead are updated via agents, etc.
Another thought is to use agents to manage the links on a scheduled basis. If you don't need real-time up-to-date references, you could run an agent that scans Database B and updates the references in Database A. With this method you could choose either to update the Database A documents themselves - or - as it sounds like you've already done, create a set of link documents that show up in an embedded view. The latter eliminates the save conflict problem.
One more idea is to hide any references when you open a document in Database A, but provide a button to "show" or "update" references. When you click that button, it fires off LotusScript to search Database B and build a list on the fly. This would probably work quickly with less than 10,000 documents. That function could update the link documents you store on the same database which feed the embedded view.
Hope this helps!
What is the best way to implement it?
As you mention creating a composite application may allow you to do this, but would be restricted to windows rather then design level in the form.
eg.
[Window A] --- trigger ---> [Window B]
If you are not familiar with this system I did a tutorial which explains the basics.
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/compappwiki.nsf/dx/ibm-my-first-wire
Although the tutorial calls back to the same database, it is easy enough to point to a different one.
Personally I'd do it through XPages. I personally find it much easier to implement then through classic style notes design/comp apps. It will also allow you to display design elements within the same screen area.
As you've already heard, Lotus Notes has no referential integrity constraints built-in, you have to do it yourself.
I wouldn't be relying on document links as they're geared around UNID's which can change if you cut and paste the same document, thus losing the link. Try this,
1/ Create an "ID" field on each document. You can populate it by using #Unique in a computed field to generate an ID, and save that to the documents in both databases. You can create an agent to do this in lotusScript (LS), or formula. (Consider using the evaluate statement if doing in LS)
2/ Create a lookup view in each database that lists the documents by the new ID (don't forget to set the "sort order" of the ID column.
3/ Using an action button that can be configured for both databases, you can create a LS function that will open the the opposing databases view and return the ID field. (NotesUIWorkspace.pickliststrings would be the simplest way to pick the documents, otherwise you could build a dialogbox. Store the list of results in a field called "linkedID" as multi-value list.
4/ There may be more info that you want to store like document title or author, so you'll need to then get a handle to those documents using getdocumentbykey and then interrogating the fields you'll need to display information on screen.
5/ You can then also add a new field on the target documents you're referring to, call it "referrerID", which is a list of documents that reference the current document. This will maintain the two-way relationship.
The field that stores links must be a multi-valued field, otherwise it gets quite cumbersome to loop through list of linked document ID's and manage them.
This approach uses a static key so you can copy databases around without losing the relationships between documents the user has invested time in producing. You can (and probably will) lose those relationships if you rely on document universal ID's (described well in the #documentUniqueID documentation), if you cut and paste the document, or copy the database somewhere else they become new documents despite copying the same fields, and will be assigned a new universal ID, any document links for the old document will be invalid.
If the information you're displaying from the other database changes, you'll need to be able to refresh that data regularly, so consider writing a scheduled agent that can do the look up and refresh the relevant fields.
If the user intends to un-link or change the relationships between documents, then you'll need to add functions that loop through the key fields and keep the lists consistent with what the user is doing. So, like I said, Lotus Notes' flat data structure requires you manage all integrity constraints yourself.
If you want to get a little fancy you can use embedded views as they do support references from another database on the same server. Some tips about handling it in LotusScript here. And use an additional view that categorises your data by the referring ID. Embedded views are ok, as long as the view they're based on is not too big, otherwise it may affect the performance of the form that it is embedded into.
In my SharePoint List, I have an "Employee" column that is a User type field. I would like to add some custom Business Logic to the processing of this field.
Currently, when the user adds a row, I check to see if the user is an Employee or a Manager and then change the behavior on this column accordingly. I do this by statically rendering the field in my custom "ListForm Rendering Template", just before my custom ListFieldIterator. I simply use a standard SharePoint FormField (and FormLabel) control. In the markup of the FormField control, I specify the FieldName (Employee) and an event handler for the Load event. In this Load event, I will check to see if the current user is an Employee or Manager (using two different SharePoint groups). If the user is an Employee I set the value of the field to the current user (this part works perfectly). I also want to change the field so it can't be modified. I thought I might be able to just change the ControlMode on the field (in the code of the OnLoad Event Handler) to Display, but for some reason this has no effect. The field still renders with the full, people picker editor. Am I not changing the fields control mode soon enough? Or is this simply not the correct approach? The other logic I want to put in is if the user is a Manager, I would like to allow that user to select the person from a list (SharePoint group) of Employees. It may be easier to just use the people picker and limit the selectable users to that group. (I think I can do this with the SelectionGroup property.) Although, it would be better if I could just provide a dropdownlist of users, which I could possibly do with a hidden dropdownlist that I would show and event handlers that I could use (handle event selectedindexchanged) to pull the value selected and populate the (now hidden) Employee (user) field. Does this approach make sense? Assuming all that will work, the real difficulty I am having is with changing the ControlMode (rendering) on the field (when the user is an employee) to a label or some kind of read only control, which is how that field renders when viewing the row, which is why I think if I can just trick the control into thinking it is in Display mode then it should work perfectly!
I am still learning SharePoint, but I am very proficient in ASP .Net. This is why I would like to keep my customizations in this Custom Rendering Template, using code behind and leverage my existing skill set as much as properly.
Any thoughts, opinions or advice? Does anyone know why I can't get the column to switch the "Control Mode"?
I do not think that I fully understand your scenario. Some code samples could help.
But anyway it sounds like you want some heavy customizations of the user field. In that case you might want to have a look at creating a custom field with all its advantages and disadvantages. Have a look at MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg132914.aspx
Another option might be - in case you do not want to re-use this column in many list definitions - that you can get away with your custom rendering template and create a custom create/edit form where you implement the specific edit behaviour for the field (plain ASP.NET with some SharePoint controls). Here is a nice walk-through on how to grab a custom edit form from SharePoint designer: http://community.bamboosolutions.com/blogs/sharepoint-2010/archive/2011/05/12/sharepoint-2010-cookbook-how-to-create-a-customized-list-edit-form-for-development-in-visual-studio-2010.aspx
I hope this helps. Kr., Bernd.
Is there a standard way to associate custom properties with a user? I need to store the number of items per page a user selected in a grid of a document library separately for each user and document library.
Edit:
Sorry about this vagueness, I wanted to do it programmatically. It seems like I've found the solution, it is UserProfileManager class, though I'm now looking into whether there is a limitation on the number of properties you can save this way for a user, because the easiest way of saving page sizes on per user+document library basis seems to be using GUIDs of Views as property names and numbers of pages as values. Though I don't know if it is more efficient or not, depends on how sharepoint stores these properties.
No, you would need to create custom code to store the data.
Given the potential amount of data created, it may be wise to store it in a separate database.
This would give greater flexibility in the way the data can be manipulated and retrieved.
Your question is a bit vague. Are you looking to do any custom code? You could do this many ways so it is difficult without knowing more of what you want.
Using custom code you could set up a workflow or event handler to respond to item events and record the information and store it using the User's Profile or as an SPPersistedObject.
If you want a less developer centric way to do it you can use auditing and simply do reporting on your audit results.
You could set up a list to store the selection data, then use events/AJAX on the document list to push tick/untick items into the selection list (store user, library and document as a minimum.
If you don't want a separate list, you could create a field in your document library that stores which users have a given document tagged... You'll still need some kind of event/AJAX to update the list when a user ticks/unticks the box. Crude :)