I have had a couple of customers write this week to ask if we had a tool to automatically convert a form or view to an XPage. This is something that wouldn't be terribly hard to do with Midas as it is, and would be even easier to build as a separate method. I asked a couple of savvy blogger friends whether it would be of interest, and they seemed to feel it would miss the point of XPages, but were otherwise noncommittal. So, what do you think? Is it necessary? Should I just write a Midas sample script, or should I produce a separate utility, or should I add a method to Midas? Should I skip the whole thing and go grab a milk shake?
For those pondering the "Why?", the logic seems to be that it would be easier to move a fairly perfect rendering of the look and feel of the form or view to an XPage element, then enhance that XPage manually to take advantages of data lookups and the sort. As one of my smart friends pointed out, Stephan Wissel will be doing a session at Lotusphere called AD215 - Practical Magic with DXL, which includes as part of the abstract:
You'll also see how to use DXL to help generate XPages from existing design elements like forms and views.
This would obviously be a way to get the fields and such onto an XPage, but what I have that Stephan won't is the high quality rich text to HTML rendering which would make the XPage retain the look and feel of the form, as well as the fields and some functionality.
So, what do you think? Worth pursuing or pointless waste of time?
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Tags: Lotus Notes