Domino Effects

Category IBM Lotus Sandbox
Bookmark :              

This morning I wished to search the Sandbox for inspiration on how to improve my form field validation routines. When I clicked the Sandbox link I had the unpleasant surprise to land on a page that says that starting on September 2010, it is no longer available.
I knew that it was closed for new submissions, but I was not expecting it to be moved offline (at least before several years...)



The Sandbox (and more generally the Note.net Web site) has been my companion since I began developing with Notes 3.0 in 1995, and more than a useful tool, this is another Lotus symbol that goes away.

If we keep the emotional aspect aside, the Sandbox was a repository I used from time to time looking for ideas and forgotten pieces of code or presentations, even after 15 years of Notes development. Read More

Posted by Thierry Cayla On 09/07/2010 Location Paris | Permalink | Comments (18)

Category Lotusphere IBM Lotus event
Bookmark :              

For the Notes experts like me who didn't have the chance to be sent to Orlando by their company (because of costs cuttings, Lotus not being strategic anymore or other reasons), it was still possible to take a sip of this big event.
Actually IBM did a great job in setting up a series of one-day FREE conferences called "Lotusphere comes to you" that presented in a condensed agenda what is supposed to be remembered from all the information given at the main event.


Furthermore, the Paris "Lotusphere comes to you" was a good occasion to visit IBM's new French headquarters: they moved a few months ago from the prestigious La Defense business district to a less expensive area not far (Bois-Colombes). I'm not going to be ironic at IBM, since I learned last week that I will undergo the same inconveniences soon. Times are hard for everyone... Read More

Posted by Thierry Cayla On 03/26/2010 Location Paris | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category ADO Connectivity RDBMS
Bookmark :              

This is a sequel to my previous post "Forget ODBC", this time I will focus on drastically improving the performance of data accesses using ADO.
Say you have a collection of several thousands of Notes employee documents you need to update with data coming from an SQL Server or an Oracle database.
The first idea would be to write a LotusScript code similar to this one:

Set employeeDoc = employeeView.GetFirstDocument
While Not (employeeDoc Is Nothing)
	query = "select EMPLID, EMAILID from PS_AOW_ID_NOTES where EMPLID = '" & employeeDoc.emplid(0) & "' and SETID = '" & employeeDoc.setid(0) & "'"
	adoRs.Open query, adoCon
	If Not (adoRs.EOF) Then
		adoRs.MoveLast
		employeeDoc.emailid = Cstr(adoRs.Fields("EMAILID").Value)
		Call employeeDoc.Save(True,True)
	End If
	adoRs.Close
	Set employeeDoc = employeeView.GetNextDocument(employeeDoc)
Wend

Actually, this is very inefficient and if you have several thousands of Notes documents to update with queries that pull data from several tables, it is likely to take hours.
Fortunately, there is a much better way to code this loop by using an other ADO object: the Command object:


Read More

Posted by Thierry Cayla On 02/17/2010 Location Paris | Permalink | Comments (6)

Category Dialog box Picklist
Bookmark :              

You've surely already heard end users complaining that all the useful information was not entirely visible at once when they are prompted for selecting values from a dialog box or a picklist.
With a little trick, there is a mean of resizing them at runtime and thus making your users happy.
You'll have to use special undocumented environment variables stored in the notes.ini file (I had to play riddles to find out the ones that are useful for our concern) that drive dialog boxes dimensions.
For your convenience, I provide a demo database with sample code in the "downloads" section of the site.



For the picklists, no hassle, the "WindowSizePickKeywords" environment variable does the trick. It contains four parameters separated by a white space, the two last ones are the width and heigth of the box. So with a few lines of LotusScript (not @Formula, for you have to write system environment variables - without a prepended dollar sign) it is easily possible to alter those values. Read More

Posted by Thierry Cayla On 12/09/2009 Location Paris | Permalink | Comments (9)

Category ODBC ADO Connectivity RDBMS
Bookmark :              

How many times I see posts in the Lotus DD forums from developers struggling with ODBC connections, system data sources on the Domino server, and all that painful stuff.
Connections to relational databases like Oracle or MS SQL Server can be set up much more easily with a few lines of LotusScript using a technique called ADO (ActiveX Data Objects).
This is made possible since the corresponding connection layer is included in every Microsoft OS since Windows 2000 (and especially on Windows 2003 server, for server-side connections).



This technique has several advantages apart the simplicity, among them the fact that it outperforms ODBC from far, that it uses the same object model to handle different back-end databases, and by the way that it does not need the dotNet framework to function.
As an example, here is how to retrieve data from a PeopleSoft HRMS system lying on an Oracle 10g database. Read More

Posted by Thierry Cayla On 11/30/2009 Location Paris | Permalink | Comments (13)