I was at a customer site today and among other things I was asked to take a look on a Sametime business card issue they were having with a custom blackbox. The issue was that the picture was not showing up in Sametime. They did already have a PMR open with Lotus Support but they had been unable to solve the issue.
The customer is using the “custom” blackbox implementation (com.ibm.sametime.userinfo.userinfobb.UserInfoNotesCustomBB) provided by IBM Lotus as part of Sametime 7.5.1 where you can specify a database path, a view and some field names in the UserInfoConfig.xml and the rest is taken care of for you. While this is well and good it still didn’t work. The problem was trivial to solve but it was difficult to explain why it simply didn’t work.
The issue was that the attributes used to specify the database path and view name are case sensitive!! The customer had simply followed the XML convention of using lowercase attribute names which turned out to be wrong. When you use this implementation the database attribute *has* to be called “DbName” and the view attribute *has* to be called “View”. If you get the casing wrong it wont work!
New PMR coming up – change the implementation of the class to make the attribute names case insensitive. Or read the article in THE VIEW 2008 Technical Supplement to see how to easily write your own blackbox… 🙂
