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Mon 11 Apr 2011, 08:18 PM
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I sometimes feel like the answer to every question I get asked by customer is somewhere buried in this steaming heap of a weblog. In less than a month, this blog will be eight years old, and still requests are made for "new" features that existed in our Midas Rich Text LSX before I started the blog.


Today, I got a question about sorting tables from the web. Of course, there are lots of ways to do that with views or lookups, but this customer has tables which are embedded in rich text fields, and wanted to export them to XHTML or DXL and then use fancy coding techniques to make them into lists, etc. etc. etc.  I did a quick search on the blog, and came up with this handy bit of coding I posted back in 2006.  It does just what the customer asked with a bit of Ajax and a simple agent.


Anyway, here it is, in all its original glory. Of course, Ajax is taken for granted these days, but this was quite the demo in 2006. And, of course, it is still something you can't really do with native Domino (at least not with rich text fields). And, of course, the code is even easier to make work in the Notes client. Incidentally, do you know when I added that SortByRow method to sort a table in a rich text field? Version 1.00 in 1997.


Table to be sorted using Midas and Ajax (for display):



Original sorting...


Member

Joined

Pledge

Increase

Que, Suzy 

1999

150.00

-50.00 

Jammer, Jo Jo

2001

100.00

100.00

Jones, Jimmy

2002

150.00

150.00

Lowa, Hona

2002

156.00

120.00

Roxx, Fred

2000

190.00

-10.00

Flintstone, Fred

2000

200.00

100.00

Friend, Dorie

2000

400.00

100.00

Gatwick, George G. 

1999

600.00

150.00

Franklin, James Earl T.

1999

750.00

100.00

Fordick, Mike

2003

1000.00

1000.00

Hannibal, George

2002

1000.00

100.00

Green, Olive

2001

1250.00

250.00

Deer, Jane

2002

2003.00

1000.00

Arnie, Miami

2002

3100.00

20.00



Sort by column 1
Sort descending by column 1
Sort numerically by column 2
Sort numerically descending by column 2
Sort numerically by column 3
Sort numerically descending by column 3


So, what is happening in this demo?  The agent code is really, really simple, so I thought I would just put it here in-line for you to look at:


Sub Initialize

   Dim session As New NotesSession

   Dim db As NotesDatabase

   Dim doc As NotesDocument

   Dim rtitem As New GeniiRTItem

   Dim rtchunk As GeniiRTChunk

   Dim unid As String

   Dim pos As Integer

   Dim column As Integer

   Dim reverse As Integer

   Dim numeric As Integer

 

'  &Sort=unid&Column=1&Numeric=Yes|No&Reverse=Yes|No

 

   Set db = session.CurrentDatabase

   Set doc = session.DocumentContext

   pos = Instr(doc.Query_String(0), "&Sort=")

   unid=Mid(doc.Query_String(0), pos+6, 32)

   pos = Instr(doc.Query_String(0), "&Column=")

   column = Cint(Mid(doc.Query_String(0), pos+8, 1))

   pos = Instr(doc.Query_String(0), "&Numeric=")

   numeric = Cint(Mid(doc.Query_String(0), pos+9, 1))   

   pos = Instr(doc.Query_String(0), "&Reverse=")

   reverse = Cint(Mid(doc.Query_String(0), pos+9, 1))      

 

   Set doc = db.GetDocumentByUNID(unid)

   Call rtitem.ConnectBackend(doc.Handle, "BlogBodyRT", True)

   Set rtchunk = rtitem.DefineChunk("Table 1")

   Call rtchunk.SortByRow(column, True, numeric, reverse)

   Print rtchunk.GenerateHTML("Table 1", "HTML", "Generation='Fragment' StandardFontTags='Yes' ")

End Sub


And that is it.  Midas reads the contents of this blog post itself, sorts the table and then spits out the content again into the space occupied before by the table, all using Ajax.  It never saves the changes, so dozens of people can try this at the same time without causing conflicts.  


Of course there are other ways to accomplish this. There are other ways to accomplish anything. But ask anyone who has ever worked with the Midas Rich Text LSX, and they'll tell you, it's just plain easy and intuitive. Did you ever stop to think about using Midas with Ajax and Xpages in a modern website?

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