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Pardon the dust while we ready Midas LSX V5

Mon 30 Sep 2013, 08:48 AM

Things may be a little scattered as we update the website and documentation and samples, but it should all come together by the end of the day. Don't be confused if the page says that 5.00 is out when it isn't available yet. If you would like to try the new collection logic or try exporting to CSV, EPUB, JSON and the rest of the formats, don't hesitate to fill out a Midas LSX 5 evaluation request, and as soon as the version is ready, you will be sent a license file.

Customers already on our maintenance and upgrades plan for the Midas Rich Text LSX 4.x will be contacted shortly after the version is released, as they will be upgraded free to the Midas LSX 5.00, but if anybody is terribly eager, feel free to contact us now and say you are ready.

The Midas LSX V5 officially supports IBM Lotus Notes/Domino 6.5/7/8/8.5.x and IBM Notes/Domino 9 Social Edition under both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows.

Oh, and for those paying attention, that means today is the last day for the offer I made back when I started the Out of Notes series.

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Out of Notes 9 - Professional Polish

Fri 27 Sep 2013, 12:14 PM

This is the ninth in my series, Out Of Notes (see Part 1 - The Challenge, Part 2 - Capsule Views, Part 3 - ePublish from XPages, Part 4 - Linked Collections, Part 5 - To SharePoint, Part 6 - By a Thread and Part 7 - MultiDatabase Export and Part 8 - Integrating with Notes 9 and the Browser Plugin). It is the last before the release of Midas LSX V5.

In this, I show how you can professionalize the exported ePub file, but with changes that would also work for Web Archive (.mht) or HTML/XHTML. The goal is to get a package that you can customize and use easily to provide content to clients, customers and salespeople in the field on mobile devices or anywhere else you want. More information and the script used are at http://mini-lessons.info/Midas16

This video shows how you can use the power of the Midas LSX integrated with the ease of the new collection exports. An interesting note for those who program with Midas users is that it also shows one of the lesser recognized features of Midas, which is the ability to work with a chunk defined as Table ID 'myBody' which is the Table with an name/id of myBody no matter where it is or how deeply nested it is.

Note: Accurate closed captions have been provided, and if English is not your first language, you might want to turn on the auto-translate. I also advise turning on HD and watching full screen so the captions show under the video.

For those curious about the actual end results, the four ePub files are linked below. From an iPad or iPhone or other eReader that supports EPUB directly, you should be able to open these by clicking on them. For most Android devices, use an eReader app and load these as books.

Tags: IBM Notes Lotus Notes Epub

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Munching on my own dogfood

Thu 19 Sep 2013, 11:04 AM

Kibbles and bits. Kibbles and bits. And ePublishing (.epub) and Web Archive (.mht) and HTML/XHTML (.htm) and so forth. Specifically, I'm working on finishing up the Midas LSX V5 Help database so that I can generate an ePublishing version, a Web Archive version and an XHTML version all from the Notes database that I will (of course) maintain. These are both to give people a sense of how those work and to offer the content in various formats that might be useful. For now, I am playing with the ePublishing version to see what works best there. It will all be driven by the same documents, but in ePub, the contents view is slimmed down some. Here are a couple of snapshots of the work-in-progress. Future projects are to take the Notes 9 Designer Help and convert it to ePub, which will be trickier because it is not in a simple Help db anymore.

Tags: Lotus Notes EPublishing

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Even in simplicity there is complexity

Mon 16 Sep 2013, 12:56 PM

One of the challenges of writing software is to balance the simplicity and complexity so that the users can mostly revel in the simplicity, but can harness the power of the complexity when necessary. For example, the following are all fairly simple agents, but the first uses only defaults and thus renders all the non-system items on the document, and renders the full rich text field. The second narrows down the export to specified fields. The third uses those same narrow set of fields, but renames them. It also says to only render the first graphic in the Photo field and to render the Col1 item as plain text.

%REM

Agent SimpleAgent1.json - Generate all non-system items

%END REM

Option Public

Option Declare

Uselsx "*lsxrtc"

Sub Initialize

Dim gColl As New GeniiCollection

Call gColl.AddByFTSearch("", "CurbAppeal.nsf", "Lyndhurst")

Print gColl.GenerateJSON("", "")

Print "Content-Type: application/json"

Print ||

Print gColl.GenerateJSON("", "")

End Sub

%REM

Agent SimpleAgent2.json - Only generate certain items in a particular order

%END REM

Option Public

Option Declare

Uselsx "*lsxrtc"

Sub Initialize

Dim gColl As New GeniiCollection

Call gColl.AddByFTSearch("", "CurbAppeal.nsf", "Lyndhurst")

Print "Content-Type: application/json"

Print ||

Print gColl.GenerateJSON("StreetAddress,City,Price,Photo,Col1", "")

End Sub

%REM

Agent SimpleAgent3.json - Rename some variables and alter the rich text generated

%END REM

Option Public

Option Declare

Uselsx "*lsxrtc"

Sub Initialize

Dim gColl As New GeniiCollection

Call gColl.AddByFTSearch("", "CurbAppeal.nsf", "Lyndhurst")

Print "Content-Type: application/json"

Print ||

Print gColl.GenerateJSON("StreetAddress=Address,City,Price=Cost,Photo[Graphic 1],Col1[Plain Text]=Plain", "")

End Sub

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Notes to JSON - Curb Appeal

Sun 15 Sep 2013, 09:10 PM

While there are different ways to create JSON output, this is a sample of how it looks when Midas V5 generates data from IBM Notes, including Notes rich text aand images. Please note that the formatting is due to JSONLint where I was validating the output, as a long stream of JSON is not too identifiable, and Midas defaults to unformatted JSON because it is is more efficient. The top is a screen capture pf the first of the four documents from the search results. The bottom is the JSON output for that document, though it is truncated on the right. You might notice that the rich text image is rendered in-line, allowing the calling program to forego any reference back to the source, That is due to the DataImages paramter I wrote about previously.

The full agent (full text search in Curb Appeal database for 'Lyndhurst'):

Option Public

Option Declare

Uselsx "*lsxrtc"

Dim fullstr As String

Sub Initialize

Dim gColl As New GeniiCollection

Dim txtstr As String

Call gColl.AddByFTSearch("", "CurbAppeal.nsf", "Lyndhurst", "")

On Event ActOnText From gColl Call ActOnText

Call gColl.GenerateJSON("", |DataImages='32000' OutputToEvent='Yes' charset="iso-8859-1"|)

Print "Content-Type: message/rfc822"