New pet project: LiveTextr

Part of my job, interest and efforts goes towards illustrating just how extensible the Notes 8 platform is. Part of this is playing around with the platform and trying to do stuff to illustrate how the platform may be extended. One of the very cool ways to extend Notes 8 is using widgets and LiveText but debugging it can be a hazzle due to the way widgets are created and installed into the platform. The goal of my latest pet project was to alleviate some of these pains and make it easier to work with LiveText.

So I’m happy to show of LiveTextr!

LiveTextr is a sidebar plugin for Notes 8 that allows you to test LiveText regular expressions against the Notes documents you have open in Notes without creating a widget first. This means that I can open a document that contains some text I would like to test against and start writing regular expressions and have them debugged in the Notes client before doing the actual widget. Installing and testing the pattern is done by clicking a button and the pattern is dynamically added to the LiveText engine.

The first screenshot shows me debugging a pattern right there in my Notes 8.5.1 client.

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LiveTextr also provides you with instant feedback on the syntax of your regular expression as you write it. This is also a problem with the built-in model as there’s no way to test your regular expression as you write the widget. The second screen shot shows the current feedback (shown in red text) when the regular expression contains errors.

Click image for larger version

Further improvements I’m planning is to allow users to build regular expressions visually (or at least without having to know the syntax of regular expressions) and to handle capture groups. I also plan to open source the project on OpenNTF.org.