TimsterC

Using the iPhone application AppBox Lite I’ve managed to calculate that it is 80 days since my BMW 320d touring went bang. I was called on Friday last week and informed by the company replacing the engine that they have a replacement engine that has done less than 10,000 miles and that my car should be ready later this week. I’m not holding my breathe as I’d be blue by now.

On the GTD front I have managed to get to an empty inbox today. YIPEEEEEE. This momentous event occurred on a flight from LHR (London Heathrow, UK) to CPH (Copenhagen, Denmark) this morning. I am in Denmark to present, what might be my last, XPages workshop.
So now I have finally finished the collection phase, it’s time to start on the action phase. Time to start calling people back and using this eProductivity mail template for really GTD (Getting Things Done). I have a huge list of stuff to do so I’d better get on with it. ;o)

SHOW112 – How to build an XPages application from start to finish

The file resources that you would need to create the LOANr application yourself in your own time can be found here. (This has been edited and a corrected .pdf included 27-Jan-10)

Included files are:

show112.pdf – the presentation that becomes your manual on how to create the LOANr XPages application.
scriptsnippets.txt – this is all the code that you are going to need to type in to make it work, but we have typed it in already numerous times so figured that we’d save you the effort.
LOANr-Start.nsf – The database that started from with just the ordinary Notes resources in it. e.g. forms, views, pages and image resources.
LOANr-Final.nsf – Is what the database should look like if you follow the instructions all the way to the end.

We hope you enjoyed the breakout session and if you have not already done so, please complete your evaluation for the session.

Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments here.

Someone asked me yesterday if I could send them an example of how to have one combo box influence what appears in another combo box on the XPage. As I’ve been asked this before (several times) I thought I should write it up.

In this example I’m picking up values from lookup documents in a lookup view. They could be anything but I have used simple  two field Notes form.

In your custom control or XPage drag two combo boxes onto the page.

Combo Boxes

In the first combo box I have bound it to the form that I want to store the data in. In this case it’s comoboboxtest with two fields on it.
For the Values I have used the following @formula

@DbColumn(@DbName(),”vwLookup”,1)

(note the capitalisation and commas)

Lookup formula

For the Events of this comobo box you need to click the onChange event (ServerSide) and then select partial refresh. In the dialog pick the other comob box that you dragged onto the page. Also you need to select the “Do not update or validate date” check box.

Event setting for Combo Box 1

Then in the second combo box bind it to the other field in your destination document.
For the values you need to add another formula.

var combo1 = getComponent(“comboBox1″).getSubmittedValue();
@DbLookup(@DbName(),”vwLookup”,combo1,2);

This sets the variable combo1 to the value that you have picked in the first combo box and then uses combo1 to lookup the values in your view. (Your view must be sorted for this to work and what you are looking up must be the first column)

values formula for Combo Box 2

The other important thing here is that you need to set this script to run dynamically instead of at page load.

And that’s it.

Download a small sample here. XPagesTesting

My thanks for Paul Hannan for helping me bug fix this with thousands of other things running through my head this morning.

So Matt and I are all ready to present on Sunday 17th Jan at Lotusphere in Orlando, Florida. The session is finished and we get just one chance to show you all what you can do with XPages. So if you want to come see the show that has taken Matt and I several days to create, then I suggest you grab one of the seats in the Swan Osprey room really quick. I hope it’s going to be a good lively session. We have far too much content for just 2 hours, so it’s going to be a race against time. We might even find some time for questions at the end, and I know that Matt has a great surprise for you all at the end too. ;o)

SHOW112 – How to build an XPages application from start to finish. Find more details here.

I have appeared on the “Someone Once Told Me” website. This is a great daily inspiration site where Mario takes pictures or gets them from his flickr group and posts them. They are all black and white and all have something that the person in the photograph has been told by someone. Simple idea and very well executed. It was a pleasure being “shot” for this even if it was bitterly cold, dark and nearly raining. I intend to shoot some of these for Mario at Lotusphere, so if you see me walking around with my camera and have something that you might want to share with the world, then please stop me and ask.

The next big announcement is that I have published my podcast called “The X Cast”. This is all to do with XPages and can be found here. We are waiting for Apple to come back with an iTunes subscription so I will tell everyone when that happens. In the mean time you can listen from the website or download the MP3 file.

Please tell me what you think about both topics.

WOW, I still can’t really believe that my session has been selected to be part of Lotusphere 2010 in Orlando, FL. Out of over 1000 session abstracts that were submitted Matt White and myself have had ours selected.
Can you guess what it’s going to be about? If you can’t then where have you been for the last 18 months?

Here is my abstract.

How to build an XPages Application from start to finish
Join us as we take you step by step and click by click through building an XPages application. Learn the basics and then grow the complexity as you expand the application.
Including; XPages, Custom Controls, server side JavaScript, single UI methodology, using existing Notes data and adding unlisted dojo objects. Watch the application being built live on stage with everything you need to know condensed into 2 hours.

So Bruce, Gayle and Matt at Elguji have taken another idea and managed to shoehorn it into the JAM format. IQJam is a great looking tool that will allow you to create a question and answer forum. As is synonymous with IdeaJam the community can vote on the questions and the person who asked can mark the question answered. Add to all this that Bruce has decided to openly publish iqjam.net for the benefit of the Lotus community, just like they have with ideajam.net.

Another XPages application from the Elguji stud that looks to be as good as the rest of the stable. It will only run on a Domino 8.5.1 server so we have a little while to wait to try it for ourselves. I’m sure the wait will be worth it.

It’s very rewarding for me to be involved with Elguji and see them working with the new technologies Lotus is creating. Watching the products go from ideas to alpha testing, beta testing and then on release to the market is extremely interesting. I can’t wait to see this product and try it out for myself.

So the folks running the UKLUG must have been drinking some pretty hard stuff recently. They have put out the agenda and I’m on it. I mean come on. I know they weren’t hard up for session abstracts. I guess I had better get on with writing something to show now. ;o)
I have been writing something anyway and I did know that they accepted my submission. I’m working on a small XPages application that I can build in front of everyone and explain it as I go along. The target is 45 minutes for the demo and 10 minutes for intro and questions. The other plan is to get a whole bunch of screen shots or a screen video of some kind that I can post after the session.
Here are the things that I will hoping to show.

• Simple data binding to a notes doc and notes view
• Creating a single UI to use again and again
• Using an unlisted dojo control in an XPage (dojox.image.Lightbox)
• Taking all that and showing it in the Notes client
• Incorporating that into a Composite Application and wiring it to a Google search gadget

So if you think you like the sound of that session then come find me on day 1 of UKLUG (8-Oct-09) 3pm-4pm in room #4. The rest of the agenda can be found HERE

Following on from the success of their first XPages Workshop Avnet Technical Solutions are running another XPages workshop on the 9th & 10th of June in Switzerland. Click here for details.

R-Com Consulting are running their first XPages workshop in Manchester on the 16th & 17th  June. Click here for details.

These lucky folks are the latest group to get up to speed on XPages.
Will you be next?