How to extend Notes 8: New version of the demo application
I just posted an update to the demo application for my Extending Notes 8 series of posts. The demo application is discussed in more detail in my previous post (How to extend Notes 8: LiveText demo application). The issue was that I had a button to create a demo e-mail in the UI which made the plugin depend on the Notes Java UI API which was added in Notes 8.5.1 and hence meant that the demo application wasn't installable on previous Notes versions... :-(
To remedy that I built an new version where the button using the offending API is added from an Eclipse plugin fragment and using a custom extension point (if you're running Notes 8.5.1+). More on that approach at a later date. For now you may install the new version using the updated widget descriptor (extension.xml) (simply drag the link to your MyWidgets sidebar plugin).
If you do an update - which there's absolutely no reason to if it already works for you - the only way to tell is by verifying that the version number at the bottom of the sidebar application is changed to 1.0.1.
That's all for this post. All the posts in the series may be found under the extending_notes8 tag.
Configure Eclipse 3.5 for Notes 8.5.2
Just updated my instructions on how to configure Eclipse 3.5 for Notes 8.5.2 with correct install_id and rcp.base_version as Notes 8.5.2 is now GOLD!! :-)
While I was out...
Just back from vacation I'm plowing through my feed reader and e-mail and found lots of cool stuff. I thought I would highlight some of it that caught my scanning eye... Julian writes about Custom SWT Buttons, Bob writes about Why BrowserFunction is so cool, Chris writes about Lotus Connections Profiles DB Purging and finally Stuart says: "Wow, a Lotus Notes book for end users".
Google Wave discontinued - what will that mean for Project Concord?
In a post the day before yesterday on the Google Blog Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow, provides an Update on Google Wave. As it stands now Google will stop development on the Google Wave platform and provide tools to liberate the data from Google Wave. This decision has been made due to users not adopting Google Wave to the extent they would have wanted. Urs Holzle emphasizes that many of the protocols and technologies have already been made open source and that they hope that developers will continue to innovate on top of the technology.
I find this very interesting. First of all there was no end to the amazement and hype that was built around Google Wave when it was first announced. Second of all it looked like very cool technology though a lot of discussion was being had on the applicability to business and how it would fit in. Would it be the next killer application and what e-mail would become down the road? Sadly the technology never stuck and we will never know.
The announcement is however also interesting from a Lotus perspective.
As you might remember IBM unveiled Project Concord at Lotusphere 2010. Project Concord is IBM Lotus' next generation web collaboration environment which also featured live character-by-character typing etc. Many of us thought of Project Concord as being a clear response to Google Wave and a way to compete with Google in that (new) space. Now that Google is halting development of Google Wave what will happen to Project Concord? Will it be left for dead as well as the technology has been proved inadequate or "not wanted" or will it provide a clear opening for IBM Lotus to pursue? Does IBM Lotus have some "other stuff" up its Project Concord sleeve that will prove it to be the killer platform that will replace e-mail as we know it. I guess only time can tell.
R.I.P. Google Wave - we loved you although we never really got to know you...
How to extend Notes 8: LiveText demo application
The day before yesterday I posted the first summary post in my Extending Notes 8 series with a complete end-to-end approach to dynamically adding LiveTex recognizers. As part of that post I uploaded a demo application (plugin) but I didn't add a screenshot so I thought I'd remedy that.
As you can see the plugin has a small welcome text and two buttons. You'll also see a textbox to hold any exception (not that I'm expecting any) that might be raised as part of adding the recognizer and content type. You may use the two buttons to easily create a demo e-mail for use with the added LiveText stuff. The left button creates the e-mail in the UI (using the new handy Java UI classes) and the right one simply sends the e-mail to you in the backend. The latter is very handy for testing as the e-mail needs to be in read mode for the LiveText sub-system to kick in.
I've put a compiled version of the plugin on my update site and tthe plugin may be installed by dragging this extension.xml file to your MyWidgets sidebar panel (policy permitting).
That's all for this post. All the posts in the series may be found under the extending_notes8 tag.
How to extend Notes 8: case insensitive LiveText patterns
When you start to do a lot of LiveText recognizers you find yourself wanting to do more advanced stuff with your regular expressions. For instance you might want to do case insensitive patterns or use some of the others regular expression modifiers. This post will show you how to do this.
By default the regular expressions you specify for your recognizers are case sensitive. This is normally fine unless you really want it to be case insensitive. Since the LiveText engine is in Java you may use the supported Java modifiers for your regular expressions. Normally the modifiers are specified when you "compile the pattern" in Java (java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(pattern, modifiers)) but as you don't have access to this process you can't do that.
There is however another way...
You can embed some modifiers in the pattern such as Pattern.MULTILINE, Pattern.UNICODE_CASE, Pattern.DOTALL and most of all Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE! You embed the modifier in the start of the pattern. So instead of doing a case insensitive pattern like this (to recognizer "lotus" and "Lotus"):
[Ll]otusyou do
(?i)lotusCool isn't it?
The following modifiers are supported in Java though not all makes sense for LiveText:
- Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE = (?i)
- Pattern.MULTILINE = (?m)
- Pattern.DOTALL = (?s)
- Pattern.UNICODE_CASE = (?u)
That's all for this post. All the posts in the series may be found under the extending_notes8 tag.
Lotus Connections 3 coming to greenhouse.lotus.com this weekend
Just got word today from the team at greenhouse.lotus.com that a beta of the next release of Lotus Connections, which is now called 3.0, is being put on greenhouse.lotus.com on the this weekend. Very nice. Below is a snippet from the newsletter.
"Starting Friday August 6th we will begin our upgrade and migration of Lotus Connections 2.5 to Lotus Connections 3.0. The Lotus Connections services will not be available from Friday August 6th at 8:00 AM until it comes back online Tuesday August 10th."
How to extend Notes 8: dynamic LiveText recognizers using Java
As I briefly described in my last post ("How to extend Notes 8: dynamic extensions using Java") it's possible to create new extensions to Lotus Notes using Java and hence inject functionality into the client dynamically. It's very cool functionality and it allows you to inject anything from content types and recognizers to sidebar panels.
In this post I'll build on three previous posts and show you how to use dynamic extensions in Lotus Notes in combination with a Java action that uses multiple capture groups for an end-to-end solution that may be deployed as a single Java extension (aka plugin). The result is a plugin that may be deployed to a client workstations which allows you to act on text recognized by the LiveText sub-system but where you have the power of Java for processing.
All the posts in the series may be found under the extending_notes8 tag.
We need three pieces of information:
- The code to dynamically inject our custom recognizer and content type into Lotus Notes without the need for an extension.xml file. This is what the LiveText sub-system uses to highlight the text for us.
- The Java action to act on the LiveText selection.
- The plugin.xml file to bind it all together.
The first piece is the code that injects the custom recognizer and content type under a known id. This code may be run in lots of ways but to make it easy for this example I choose a sidebar panel. Below is the createPartControl-method from that class.
public void createPartControl(final Composite parent) {
try {
// define XML
final String extensionXml = ...;
// get extension registry and load extension
// into registry
final IExtensionRegistry reg = Platform.getExtensionRegistry();
InputStream ins = new ByteArrayInputStream(extensionXml.getBytes());
Bundle bundle = Activator.getDefault().getBundle();
IContributor contr = ContributorFactoryOSGi.createContributor(bundle);
reg.addContribution(ins, contr, false, null, null, null);
} catch (Throwable t) {
t.printStackTrace();
}
}
The above code injects the recognizer and content type with an id of DCCT.ExampleContentType.1234567890 into the client.
The next part we need is the action class (again implementing org.eclipse.ui.IObjectActionDelegate) to act on the LiveText selection. Most of the code you've seen before in a previous post but again it goes and get the text from the underlying document as document properties.
public void selectionChanged(IAction action, ISelection selection) {
IDocumentContent doc = null;
// cast/adapt selection
if (selection instanceof StructuredSelection) {
Object sel = ((StructuredSelection)selection).getFirstElement();
if (sel instanceof IDocumentContent) {
doc = (IDocumentContent)sel;
}
} else if (selection instanceof IDocumentContent) {
doc = (IDocumentContent)selection;
} else {
// try and adapt
IAdapterManager amgr = Platform.getAdapterManager();
doc = (IDocumentContent)amgr.getAdapter(selection,
IDocumentContent.class);
}
if (null == doc) {
this.contents = null;
this.prodFamily = null;
this.partNumber = null;
return;
}
// get data from document property
this.contents = doc.getProperties().getProperty("contents");
this.prodFamily = doc.getProperties().getProperty("pf");
this.partNumber = doc.getProperties().getProperty("pn");
}
The last piece is the plugin.xml to put it all together using the org.eclipse.ui.popupMenus extension point. Notice how we use the content type id we know (bold text below) from our dynamically deployed content type.
<extension
point="org.eclipse.ui.popupMenus">
<objectContribution
id="com.lekkimworld.extnotes8.dynext.objCtr1"
objectClass="com.ibm.rcp.content.IDocumentContent">
<visibility>
<and>
<objectState
name="content.type"
value="DCCT.ExampleContentType.1234567890">
</objectState>
<objectState
name="contents"
value="*">
</objectState>
</and>
</visibility>
<action
class="com.lekkimworld.extnotes8.dynext.MyAction"
enablesFor="*"
id="com.lekkimworld.extnotes8.dynext.action1"
label="Do me!">
</action>
</objectContribution>
</extension>
The result when deployed to a Lotus Notes client is something like the screenshot below where you get a Java action to act on a LiveText recognition. Only change this time is that all the functionality is provided from your plugin. No separate extension.xml is necessary for the recognizer or the content type.
That's how it's done. I've uploaded an Eclipse project to the blog so you can download it and install it in your Eclipse as a demo. You can download the project here.