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LS sessions db updated plus Blackberry and iPhone apps
Tue 4 Jan 2011, 03:02 PM

I have just posted the updated Lotusphere 2011 Sessions database which has more sessions (268 including repeats), more books for Lotus professionals (36), more courses (22), more people who are Twitter-identified (256, including 91 speakers and 15 authors) and more features (Tweet this for sessions, sort by books ordered, etc).

But the news that will probably please the most people is that Tim Davis has posted instructions for downloading the Blackberry and iPhone app versions of the database, and has promised an iPad-specific version as soon as Apple approves it.  Go to the Lotusphere 2011 Sessions database page for instructions and a most-recent version of the Notes database.

Copyright © 2011 Genii Software Ltd.

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Fun with formulas in session db for social networking
Tue 4 Jan 2011, 12:40 PM
It is fun once in a while to have to do something with formula language.  I added a Tweet button to the LS 2011 Sessions database (although I plan to rename it Share so that I can add facebook and such).  Feel free to tell me what a lousy job I did and how I could have done it better with @Transform.  I love that stuff.  The rules are simple.

1) It needs the Subject (which is the session id plus title) and some wrapper text.  I included the #LS11 hashtag so that it would be more easily found.

2) It needs to reference the speakers, some of whom have a filled-in TwitterID field and some of whom do not.  Those with a Twitter id should appear as @blanghinrichs while those who do not should appear as Ben Langhinrichs.  In other words, all speakers should appear, whether or not they have an id, but the ones with an id should also have an @ in front of them.

3) It must fit into 140 characters.  I chose to shorten the subject and add an ellipses (three dots) at the end if the whole thing was too long.  Obviously, the person tweeting can alter any and all of this, but I thought it would be good to start somewhere.

Here is what I came up with:

sp1:= @DbLookup(""; ""; "People"; Speaker[1]; "TwitterID"; [FailSilent]:[PartialMatch]);
sp1a:= @If(sp1=""; Speaker[1]; "");
sp2:= @If(@Count(Speaker) < 2; ""; @DbLookup(""; ""; "People"; Speaker[2]; "TwitterID"; [FailSilent]:[PartialMatch]));
sp2a:= @If(@Count(Speaker) < 2; ""; sp2=""; Speaker[2]; "");
sp3:= @If(@Count(Speaker) < 3; ""; @DbLookup(""; ""; "People"; Speaker[3]; "TwitterID"; [FailSilent]:[PartialMatch]));
sp3a:= @If(@Count(Speaker) < 3; ""; sp3=""; Speaker[3]; "");
speakerids := @Trim(sp1:sp2:sp3);
speakerstr := @If (@Implode(@Trim(speakerids); " ") = ""; ""; @Implode("@"+@Unique(@Trim(speakerids)); " "))+@Implode(@Trim(sp1a:sp2a:sp3a); " ");
idlen := @Length(speakerstr);
subjlen := @Length(Subject);
extralen := @If (idlen+subjlen+24 > 140;  (idlen+subjlen+24)-140; 0);
msg := "Look at #LS11 " + @If (extralen > 0 & subjlen > extralen+3; @Left(Subject; subjlen-extralen-3)+"..."; Subject) + @If(idlen = 0; ""; " given by "+speakerstr);
url := @Text(@URLEncode("Domino"; msg));
"http://twitter.com/?status="+@If(@IsError(url); SessionTitle; url)

Fun to play with some of these coding tricks I haven't used in a while.

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