I have used postForm from Text.Digestive in digestive-functions which returns something like a (Just view, Nothing) in the case of a form error. I can then take the view and render it to HTML to display the form errors.
My issue is that I do not want every field to be rendered as given by the user. Specifically, my captcha value should be reset to a newly computed one rather than reusing the old one (which would give an infinite number of captcha attempts). But I do not know how to compute a new view with one field cleared/set, given the old view.
Alternatively, does anyone know if this would be easier with reform? I haven't looked at it much yet but it seems nice that it does away with the string-based-programming part of digestive-functors.
I repeated the question on the bug tracker where someone eventually came up with a working hack. The view value turns out the be a record. You can mutate its viewInput field before rendering it. viewInput is an association list from paths to forms.
Related
Sorry this isn't a specific coding question, it is more of a design concept.
What is the usage case for programmatically adding and removing fields to Notes Forms e.g. NotesDocument.RemoveItem(), ie why would you add and remove fields in the background?
For many years I have designed my forms with the fields layed out on the form which are required and then hide and show as required.
By adding dynamically you can't position them and frustratingly removing them or deleting they still appear the Database Fields in Domino Designer, getting rid of them is a bit a a black art, but that's another story.
I must be missing a trick or a basic design concept. Any thoughts on best practice would be appreciated.
Many thanks.
Yes, you are missing the difference between "Fields" and "Items". A field is a design element that you can place anywhere on your form. You define how it looks, what content it contains, what datatype it is, etc.
When creating a document with the form the value of the FIELD is stored in an ITEM in the resulting NotesDocument.
This item is totally decoupled from the field that created it. If you were to change the field in the form from text to number or move it around or make a names- field of it, the item in the existing documents would never change unless you open the documents and save them in frontend or use any LotusScript or Formula Code to recalculate the document in backend.
Very often items are added programmatically to documents to fulfill different purposes: Calculate values to be displayed in views, calculate values that are import for the workflow but not for the user, etc.
Complex applications often consist of a lot more items than there are fields in the several forms.
Back to your question: Removing an item from a document simply removes the value that was created by the field in the form. When reopening the document, the item will be repopulated, either by default value or whatever....
Usually you would use this to remove items that you no longer need (and probably already removed from the form).
As soon as you removed all references to a field / item everywhere in design and documents, you can finally get rid of it completely by compacting the database.
An item is distinct from a field in Notes. The form is purely a UI concept, the item is what the data is stored in.
Manipulating data in the backend can be used for a number of reasons. One such use case is the setting of a flag when a date on the form has expired.
Say you want a view showing all documents that have expired. Your rules dictate that documents are considered as "Expired" after 7 days. You could create a view with a formula that shows all document whose date is 7 days older than today:
SELECT Date < #Adjust(#Today; 0; 0; -7; 0; 0; 0);
This view will ALWAYS be out of date and will constantly be updated by the server as it re-evaluates #Today.
Now, a better way would be to create an agent that runs daily that sets an item on the document to indicate that it has expired e.g.
#SetField("Expired"; 1);
The view formula would then be
SELECT Expired = 1
The view would only need to update daily and you have a much faster view because of it.
RemoveItem is used to get rid of data no longer needed e.g. FaxNumber.
There are many use cases for RemoveItem. Here's one that comes up frequently.
You have a database and an agent that processes documents in that database. Every time it runs, the agent replaces the value of a bunch of items. There are a variety of error conditions that can cause it to abort processing a document early, but you're a smart programmer and you've accounted for that with on error traps. When you hit one, you log an error message, save your document, and then either abort your agent or go on to processing the next document.
But at this point, some of the items that the agent normally updates have values saved from this run, and some of them have values saved from a previous run. This might be bad. This might be confusing for someone who is looking at the item values and trying to figure out what's going on. This might even cause validation errors on the form.
So how do you avoid this? At the very beginning of your agent, you call a cleanup sub that finds and removes all the items that the agent is going to update. Now you have a clean slate, and if your agent hits that error condition, it can save whatever it can save without any concern about whether it is leaving things in an inconsistent state. Of course, in cases where you are doing this to avoid validation errors, your validation formulas will have to be smart enough to be checking #IsAvailable for dependent items, but that's a good practice anyhow.
I would like to conditionally run a custom converter. I have an XPages that handles editing and new data on the same page. The user selected a radio button to edit or create a new item.
The input fields are shared between these two functions. Upon page load I do not know what the user will do so I cannot use the "Loaded" property of the converter.
I need to format the data in this format '$900,000'. Note that there is no cents in my required format.
The built in converter for numbers or currency fails me because no matter what I do, it always add the cents. I assume that this is a bug in XPages. It doesn't matter if I say "Integer Only" or set the Maximum Fraction Digits to zero. The cents do not go away.
I have a custom converter that works fine for me, but only works when it is recalculated once, and fails when recalculated. I have tried setting the partial refresh updates to "Do not validate or update data" and this works, but breaks other parts of the page where I needs the updates to be enabled.
This application is soon to be deployed and it is too late for me to re-engineer the whole page structure to solve this issue -- too many moving parts. All I need to do to please the testers it to get rid of the cents (xxxx.00) that are added to the value, and still have everything else work.
My problem is singular, but my questions are tri-fold. How can I:
Get the built-in currency converter to remove cents the way it should? Or
Get the custom converter to be enabled ONLY based on a user-entered value? Or
Help me think of a different approach to solving this issue?
Steve, I have really fought a battle with converters as another problem is that they are all run prior to validation - and as such error messages are not necessarily shown in sequential order.
Therefore, I ended up using validators (also for the work of the converters). And on top of that I use "binding" of the components (not the values) to easily access other fields on the same page. This allows for conditional checks/logic. If you have not tried component binding, then there is a great introduction by Tim Tripcony.
/John
A couple ways to do this, One would be to do the conditionally checking of user in the custom converter. Another approach would be to use a PhaseListener and in RenderResponse Phase get the Component and set the Converter on the component to null when you don't need it on the component. I typically don't use converter though if its just the display of the number, just if I actually need the value converted. I would use something like a display Mask I've recently used a jquery plugin called maskMoney that worked well for a similar problem.
I assume your converter is on an editable field, because otherwise it won't fail on submitting data.
The problem sounds to be timing. The converter has to run during page load, in order to convert the Number value stored in the database to a String value required by the browser. So some default needs to be set, which presumably is to connect it.
If you're then wanting to change the display option based on input, you've got to do a partial refresh after the input, in order to recalculated whether cents should appear.
Once the inputted value is passed back from the browser to the underlying component tree, you can calculate accordingly - providing your converter knows what to interact with. The process dugint he partial refresh is to restore the component tree, apply the request values (store the String value from the browser into the submittedValue property of each component), process any converters or validators, then update the component tree. So when the converter runs, the radio button's value property isn't set, so it works on the last refresh's setting - the default.
By choosing "Do not validate or update data" then you're saying don't bother writing back any inputted entries from the browser into the component tree. So I'm sure you can that means the converter will know nothing about what's been input.
John's suggestion on binding is a good one, but remember you'll be needing the submittedValue property of the relevant component. For a radio button, I'm not 100% sure what that will be, but you should be able to print it out.
The mask approach may work. Someone else used that recently to make integers work right.
The other option is to look at the Extension Library's Dojo Number Validation Text Box, which has a javaType property and a more flexible set of converters. That may well allow you to avoid cents. If it does and you don't want the Dojo look and feel, it's converter should give some ideas on what your converter needs to do to remove cents.
I could not get any of the answers above to work, so I cloned the text box. I made one show up for "Edit", and one show up for "New". I kept everything the same, but only added the custom converter to the one that shows for "Edit".
Thanks again for all your help. The XPages community rocks!
I'm trying to read the contents of a "list view" using automation. The first time I navigate to it, I'm able to go from item to item, getting the correct text for each list item. However, when I display a different screen (which is apparently reusing this display object), the text on the screen is different, but automation gets the same text as the first set. From then on I can only get the text for the first view I looked at. It's like the text is being cached and I'm only able to look at the cached view. UISpy, however, seems to grab the right values every time, and if I use it while my automation is paused, I end up getting the right values.
In my automation, I use Find to grab the header, and walk the tree to the List View and get the text for each element. I thought if you used the Current property, you got the live data. Apparently I was mistaken. How do I either refresh the tree or get the REAL data?
Yes, the Current property on a certain AutomationElement will return its current, 'live', value. UIA will not cache anything automatically, you'll have to declare it yourself and explicitly access the Cached properties.
What's probably happening is that the new tree items you're seeing after selecting a different screen, are actually re-created (and that actually makes sense, UI-wise), not just updated. You could easily determine if this is the problem by selecting the first screen and writing down the tree items' RuntimeId property (you can see it in UI Spy). Then, select the second screen and check if the RuntimeId has changed. If it has, then it's just not the same object instance.
If this is the case, all you need to do is get the items again. It'll be easier to do this using AutomationElement.FindAll with a ClassName property condition.
I have a fairly straightforward and common use case. A panel, in which resides a repeat control. The repeat control gets its content from a view lookup by key. Below that repeat control is another panel. This panel has a data binding to a new notesdocument. The panel has a couple of fields on it for the new document and a submit button.
It all works, however after submit (presumably in the "postSaveDocument()" event) I want to call back up to the repeat control and have it re-perform its lookup and refresh its content.
I'm looking to understand syntactically, how I can reference the repeat control and its properties and methods from elsewhere on the document -- and secondarily (though I can look this up once I get the first part figured out) what the refresh() method would be for that that repeat control.
Ideally, I think its something like: xp:page.repeatcontrolname.refresh() -- though I know that isn't right.
I'm sure once I see an example, it will apply to a myriad of other things.
Update :
I discovered that the repeated elements were actually refreshing but I wasn't seeing a new entry added to the list. The reason, ultimately, turned out to be that to add another entry to the repeat list I needed a new "control" -- but I'd checked that box (on the repeat control) that said "Create Controls at Page Creation". It was preventing my XPage from creating another entry for the new document to display!
This article explains the syntax for doing what you describe:
http://avatar.red-pill.mobi/tim/blog.nsf/d6plinks/TTRY-84B6VP
I have a feeling that this one captures the actual use case.
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/ddwiki.nsf/dx/Create_and_display_responses
The key setting that people tend to miss is "ignoreRequestParams".
Andrew,
The 'XSP.PartialRefreshGet' call was broken in Domino release 8.5.3 which results in the '_c9 is undefined' error.
Have a look at the article posted by Tommy Valand:
http://dontpanic82.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/patch-for-bug-in-xsppartialrefreshget.html
Basically to work around the problem a second argument is required to be passed to the call, for example:
XSP.partialRefreshGet("#{id:ExistingDevicesList}", "")
Using Lotus Notes designer I have created a form and added a field on that form that does a #DBColumn look up. The form then is viewed through the web browser and everything worked great.
I proceed to add another document to the database using that form, now the original documents still render in the browser fine but the new document doesn't return anything to the field.
I tried removing the #DBColumn look up and just displaying text but nothing I just get 0.
The weird thing is if I rename the field to something diferent everything works perfectly but then if I rename the field back, broken, no calculation.
Does anyone know why this is? It has happened to me with various fields through out my application. I originally thought maybe it was a reserved word thing but I now know that is not the case. I usually just rename the field and move on but there has to be an explanation. Is it a caching thing or what?
Thanks for the info!
You haven't mentioned the type of your fields Is it 'computed for display'? If you have computed for display fields in a form, and the documents already contain data stored in an item with the same name, then the computed formula is bypassed and the item value is displayed as-is.
Fields not calculating could be a caching issue. Try opening the form, edit mode, F9 to recalculate all fields.
If this does not help, close the form, press Ctrl+Shift+F9 to forcefully refresh all views in the DB (could take some time). Reopen your form, edit mode, F9. If the value shows up, try using the "nocache" parameter on your #DBColumn.
Depending on your application design, there could be a number of reasons for the problem. Perhaps the view used for lookup is not set to autorefresh or the server does not refresh often enough because of high load issues.