Genii Weblog

XPages and attachment icons

Thu 24 May 2012, 10:29 AM



by Ben Langhinrichs
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.

What has been said:


1012.1. Steve (05/25/2012 12:41 PM)

Your screen shot is XPages in the client, does this work in XPages in a Browser as well?


1012.2. Steve (05/25/2012 05:19 PM)

Thanks for the response. This is very interesting, something that I am sure would useful to XPages developers.


1012.3. Dilip (02/07/2013 04:18 AM)

Hai,

I am using a file download control and a file upload control, both are bound to a richtext control on an Xpage. I am uploading the files through file upload control and I see the uploaded file in the "file download" control. Also I am able to see that the file is embedded in the rich text field control. There is a button which creates a notes document in the back end and composes the email and sends it. But on the receiving end when the e-mail is received the attachments in the rich text are not found. Only the body of the rich text is seen. Any idea why the attachments are not sent through email which are already embedded in the rich text field control ? Please get back to me.


1012.4. Ben Langhinrichs (02/07/2013 12:56 PM)

I'm not sure, but it may depend on when you send the email and how you send it. A large part of the issue is that Notes keeps converting back andforth between MIME and HTML and rich text. CoexEdi solves some of tht, but if you then open the saved document to send it, you are probably converting back to rich text and losing something in the process.