TimsterC

So I’ve been challenged in my Open University course to try and understand a bunch more about time management and how it can help me.
Being a Lotus bod I decided to take another look at eProductivity that I saw demonstrated at Lotusphere 2009, but Erick Mack and David Allen of GTD fame.

Having listened to David Allen read his Getting Things Done (GTD) book a bunch of times (I have it as an audio book), I think I get the process. I have no decided to take the plunge and investigate integrating that into my Lotus Notes mail file to get the full effect of what it can do for me. eProductivity is just such an application that will change the look, feel and functionality of my mail file. It’s safe for me as I know how to control the security in Notes (ECL) and I have complete control over my mail file (Manager Access). If after evaluating this on a 4 week trial I discover that it’s not for me then I can revert back to the Lotus designed mail file and nothing will be lost. You have to love Notes for it’s flexibility.

So here goes, downloading the template now and replacing the design of my mail file this morning. Then it’s off to lunch for a stiff drink. ;o) When I come back I’ll start the spring clean with a trawl through my existing inbox and work out what needs to go where.

I’ll post my progress and let you all know how I’m getting on as I get into this. I’ll also share any tips and tricks I find along the way.

Full Disclosure
I feel it only fair to inform everyone that I will not be hiding anything in these blog posts, but if I like eProductivity, they have offered me a free license if I want to continue using it. All I have to do is blog about it. But I want you all to know that if it’s bad, needs changing, crashes my mail file, revolutionizes my life or annoys the life out of me, I’ll be telling everyone.
My thanks go to Erik Mack and Ryan Heathers for offering this opportunity to me.

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.

So I woke up yesterday at 4:30am after finally getting to bed at 1:00am. So that’s a total of 3 hours 30 minutes for Friday night.

Last night I curled up at midnight and then woke up at 3:00am with slides running through my mind. Every time I closed my eyes, back the slides came and that’s the way it’s been since. Do you think I have something on my mind? Possible

So after 6 hours and 30 minutes sleep in the past 48 hours, I get to present at 1:30pm today. Then I’m going to bed. If I don’t see you at the beach party tonight I apologise in advance. ;o)

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.