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Civility in critiquing the ideas of others is no vice. Rudeness in defending your own ideas is no virtue.


Thu 31 May 2012, 09:40 AM
I've been doing custom work with a few customers who have needed to extract data from Notes databases, either to move to Sharepoint or to preserve a snapshot of Notes data outside of Notes for archival reasons and for discovery reasons. I am planning on making this a more formal offering, but the most variable part is the export of views. Sometimes, a view is just a collection, and the view is not valuable if the documents themselves are stored. In other cases, the view has columns with complex formulas that are not worth reproducing externally, so the view columns themselves are relevant. This is especially true in an archived snapshot, as it is harder to reproduce the formulas effectively in HTML than it is in Sharepoint.

Obviously, both must be possible, but the sad fact is that the people tasked with these projects often don't have either the institutional knowledge or the expertise to know how to choose. Therefore, I must make the best guess I can. Imagine a database with twenty views, ten of which contain all the documents in the database. I could easily have a snapshot which is ten times larger than the documents exported alone if I simply export them all.

Not really looking for a solution here, but I'd be happy to hear any thoughts. Also, if you might want to export some whole or partial databases for archival, snapshot or migration purposes, feel free to contact me to discuss your needs to see if we can help.

Copyright © 2012 Genii Software Ltd.

Fri 25 May 2012, 10:33 AM
Regarding yesterday's post, the attachment icon logic in the soon-to-be-released CoexEdit 3.0 works equally well in the browser or the traditional Notes client rich text interface. When opened in rich text, the attachments return to traditional attachments with their standard icons. The following three shots are the same document, created originally in CKEditor. It is unaltered, but could have been created in any of the three places. Click on any of the images to see them full size.

In the Notes client using XPages...

Inline JPEG image


In the web browser, using XPages...

Inline JPEG image


In the Notes client, using standard rich text...

Inline JPEG image

Copyright © 2012 Genii Software Ltd.

Thu 24 May 2012, 10:29 AM
One of the powerful features of Lotus Notes from early days was the ability to attach files in situ, where they were relevant. For reasons that have always escaped me, other products have not followed suit, and most attachments in email and elsewhere are attached to the document as a whole rather than to a specific place.

As more and more applications for Lotus Notes/Domino are created using XPages or updated to use XPages, the rich text fields are displayed using CKEditor rather than the native Notes renderer. This loses that traditional placement of the file attachments. One of the features of CoexEdit 3.0, due to be released in the next week or so, is that file attachments can again be placed where you choose and will render as they do in Notes. The following is a screen shot of a document created in the CKEditor through a standard XPage rich text control. This happens to be a standard discussion database, but the code will work without any design changes on any XPage application that uses rich text fields.

The only configuration for this was the following three lines added to the NOTES.INI:

extmgr_addins=CoexEd
CoexEditEnableXpages=1
CoexEditServerTasks=notes,notes2

Inline JPEG image

Copyright © 2012 Genii Software Ltd.

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Mon 14 May 2012, 09:05 AM
The past six months have been difficult. As some of you know, my father is dying. I don't talk about it a lot (heck, I haven't been talking about anything a lot recently), but he is at the hospice stage now, so it is only a matter of time. The whole experience has been very tough on my mom as well. They've been married fifty-three years, so it is emotionally rough even imagining him gone, but the care giving role also takes a great toll. I have a brother who is a nurse who lives near them, and he's been a great help.

In any case, I've been working with clients on custom work, and working on new releases of all three major product lines (CoexLinks, CoexEdit and Midas), but haven't felt right about releasing anything major when I have been so distracted. As things are settling down some with my dad (he doesn't leave his bed much), I am going to try to get these out so that customers can take advantage of some of the cool new features. More about that later, though. For now, I just wanted you to know that I am here and alive, despite my near total silence.

For those who want the quick family catch up, my wife is working as an aide and tutor at the elementary school across the street (an enviable commute) and absolutely loving it. She started on a volunteer basis, but they insisted on hiring once she started working with multiple classes. My daughter is high up on Obama's digital team working on the 2012 campaign (read: no sleep, bad food, amazing opportunities). Hard to believe the level she has reached by 25... unless you know her. My older son is graduating from the University of Chicago in three weeks, after which he hopes to take the summer off doing "some grunt work" in Washington, DC. My younger son is finishing up junior year, having taken Russian, Greek and Latin along with slews of other horribly difficult courses that make my brain hurt. College, and thus empty-nesting for us, looms. 

Copyright © 2012 Genii Software Ltd.