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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.

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.

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]otus

you do

(?i)lotus

Cool 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)

Please bear in mind that it probably only makes sense to use DOTALL and CASE_INSENSITIVE.

That’s all for this post. All the posts in the series may be found under the extending_notes8 tag.