lekkimworld.com - SnTT category

Show 'n Tell Thursday: Configuring Ubuntu for Notes 8 plugin development (2 April 2009)

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:29:16 GMT

This weeks SnTT post is about configuring Eclipse on Ubuntu 8.0.4 for Notes plug-in development. I use Notes 8.5 but it should work equally well for Notes 8.0.x clients. Wan't to develop plug-ins? Well read on and do it on Ubuntu. Notes 8.x runs freakishly fast on Ubuntu. Read on...

Actually this is a cheat post as the steps are almost the same as for doing it on Windows. Most of the stuff has to do with platform differences. My post for doing it on Windows is here. I have updated this guide with steps for Linux. Enjoy!!

Show 'n Tell Thursday: SWT drag'n'drop in Notes 8.0.x and Notes 8.5 (19 February 2009)

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 08:58:40 GMT

This weeks SnTT post is about adding drag'n'drop of Lotus Sametime buddies in the Notes 8.0.x Standard and Notes 8.5 Standard client in SWT plug-ins. Unfortunately the Sametime API for dragging buddies around changed between Sametime 8.0.0 and Sametime 8.0.1 so you have to take this into account when developing drag'n'drop functionality that works across Notes 8.0.x and Notes 8.5. Read on...

As mentioned in my Drag'n'drop in SWT components post drag'n'drop uses a socalled Transfer classes to signal which types of data a drag source delivers and a drop target accepts. To allow Sametime buddies to dropped on your component you use PersonGroupTransfer class but this class changed package from Sametime 8.0.0 to Sametime 8.0.1... :-(

In Sametime 8.0.0 (Notes 8.0.x) the class is com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.people.PersonGroupTransfer and in Sametime 8.0.1 (Notes 8.5) the class is com.ibm.collaboration.realtime.people.PersonGroupTransfer (do not mind that the Sametime 8.0.0 class is in an "internal" package as it is exported from the plug-in). This means that if you develop a plug-in that needs to run on both Notes 8.0.x and Notes 8.5 you need to factor the drag'n'drop support out into two separate plug-ins and match based on perfect version numbers of the com.ibm.rcp.collaboration.realtime.people.impl plug-in.

It's a bit cumbersome but it works fine.

Show 'n Tell Thursday: Easy access to Lotus Connections Profiles translation files (21 August 2008)

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 10:28:23 GMT

This weeks SnTT post is about Lotus Connections and how to more easily get access to and change the translation files for the UI of the Profiles feature.

Configuring which pieces of information are surfaced in the Profiles feature is pretty easy and well documented using the profiles-config.xml file. Changing the label text however is harder and not that easy to do. As it is documented it involves stopping profiles, locating a jar-file, extracting it using WinZip, changing a properties file, repackaging the jar-file, redeploying the jar-file and finally restarting profiles to see the change. This is well and good and acceptable if you only need to change the file once, but chances are that it's an iterative process and you need to do it multiple times. Wouldn't it be easier to simply stop profiles, change the file and restart profiles? Well read on to see how.

The labels for the fields (and all the other pieces of text for that matter) in Profiles are stored in property files in a jar-file in the Profiles application. Changing the property files for the appropriate language causes the text to change in the UI after a restart of the Profiles application. This is easy enough but require a lot of repeated steps every time since you have to unpack the jar-file, change the property file and repack the jar-file.

Since Profiles is just another Java web application we can move some of the classes and property files out of the jar-file (in the "lib"-directory) and into the "WEB-INF/classes"-directory. This means that we only have to repack the jar-file once and for all since the property files are now available from the "classes"-directory.

On your Websphere Application Server where the Profiles feature is installed (with Profiles stopped) do the following using a file explorer:

Open the profile directory for the profile you're using
Open the installedApps directory and the node directory underneath it (chances are that there's only one node directory)
Open the Profiles.ear directory
Open the peoplepages.war directory
Open the WEB-INF directory
Create a new directory called "classes", and inside this directory create a com/ibm/peoplepages/webui directory (a total of 4 directories)
Open the lib directory and locate the peoplepages.web.jar file and make a backup copy of this file
Now unzip the jar-file (maybe renaming it to a zip-file first), navigate through the directories to com/ibm/peoplepages/webui and move the resources folder to the "classes/com/ibm/peoplepages/webui"-directory you created above
Navigate back to the extracted jar-file and zip the "com" and "META-INF" directories back up into peoplepages.web.jar and overwrite the peoplepages.web.jar file you located in step 7

Now you should have replaced the original peoplepages.web.jar file with a new one and have a directory containing the resource files.

Now when ever you need to change a label for a field simply locate the label or text you would like to change in the property files underneath WEB-INF/classes/com/ibm/peoplepages/webui/resources and restart Profiles.

Please note that the above probably isn't supported by IBM... :-)

Show 'n Tell Thursday: Cross compiling sidebar plugins for Notes 8.0.x and Notes 8.5 (7 August 2008)

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 07:28:38 GMT

I haven't done a SnTT in months (actually the last one was back on 24 May 2007) so I guess it's about time. This week it's about cross compiling sidebar plugins for Notes 8.5 and Notes 8.0.2. Enjoy...

Since installing Notes 8.5 I have had a lot of trouble developing in Eclipse 3.4 for Notes 8.5 and having the plugins work in Notes 8.0.x as well. The problem showed itself as a NullPointerException when trying to load the plugin Activator and a "Viewpart is null" message in the Notes UI. Looking at the log trace showed a class incompatibility message ("bad major version at offset=6").

So far I have been screaming my lungs out, developing in Eclipse 3.4 and building the plugins in a virtual machine with Eclipse 3.2 as I couldn't get plugins to work otherwise. Now I finally found a solution that lets me develop in Eclipse 3.4 and having the plugins work in Notes 8.0.x and Notes 8.5.

The issue is that Eclipse 3.4 configured with Notes 8.5 as a target platform is using Java 6 and that Notes 8.0.x is using Java 5 which causes class format problems. The solution is to set the required execution environment in Eclipse 3.4 which will cause Eclipse to build correctly. Setting the required execution environment (J2SE-1.5) is done in the "Overview"-tab of the MANIFEST.MF editor as shown below.

Using the GUI is of cause just a shorthand for editing the manifest manually. As an alternative you can edit your META-INF/MANIFEST.MF file directly and add the following line:

Bundle-RequiredExecutionEnvironment: J2SE-1.5

Please note that this is not the default value when creating new plugins in Eclipse 3.4 so you'll have to pay attention and make sure it's set correctly. This is of cause only necessary if your plugins need to work on Notes 8.0.x as well as Notes 8.5.

Thanks to Pierre Carlson from IBM for pointers on this.

Show 'n Tell Thursday: Showing a progress bar / joining threads (24 May 2007)

Thu, 24 May 2007 06:15:23 GMT

Well it has been a long time since my last SnTT post so here we go. This post is on showing a progress bar from a Java agent while loading data in another thread. This post is based on a post on developerWorks.

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Show 'n Tell Thursday: The missing link for plugging Notes into you Sametime 7.5 plugin (10 January 2007)

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 15:14:36 GMT

Have you started developing plugins for Sametime 7.5 or are you planning to? If you are, you need to know something about the requirements for using the Notes/Domino Java API in your plugin. This post has some information about this and is an extract of an upcoming THE VIEW article on Sametime 7.5 development slated for the March/April issue.

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Show 'n Tell Thursday: Removing the slash screen from Sametime 7.5 (5 October 2006)

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 11:54:21 GMT

In this installment of SnTT I'm going to focus on Sametime 7.5 and the slash screen which takes forever to disappear. Since I'm running Sametime 7.5 from my startup folder on Windows the slash screen is really annoying. There is a solution however - let's remove it/not show it...

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Show 'n Tell Thursday: Don't rely on the default font-size (28 Sept 2006)

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 05:56:41 GMT

Do not rely on the default font being Default Sans-serif and the default fontsize being 10pt when doing Notes programming. There are situations where this wont be true.

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