Why you should develop with the same version as your users use

Got a call from a customer running Notes 7 today. He told me that they were no longer able to search using the “Fill out example form” without getting an error message (“The linked document cannot be found in the view”). After looking into the matter and looking for the obvious first (ie. no default view in the database) I looked more carefully at the Fill Out Example Form dialog and saw some interesting entries in the form dropdown as shown below.

That’s right. Our new psudo-design elements (build.properties, plugin.xml, WEB-INF/faces-config.xml, .classpath, .project) generated by DDE (Domino Designer on Eclipse) shows up as forms in the search dialog and even worse as forms you can use to search with. Now I know it’s impossible to make future-proff software but on that’s not good. Nothing Lotus can do about it though.

So what’s the morale? Well be sure you know what effects using a newer Designer client may have on your users before using it. You have been warned…

LotusScript.doc v.2 survey

So it’s been a while since I last wrote about LotusScript.doc v.2 but rest asssured that the project isn’t dead. Not by a long shot. I have picked up developing LotusScript.doc v.2 again and the code is actually 99% done. I’m currently putting the final touches to the code for a public beta release.

Part of the goals for v.2 is getting ready for Domino Designer on Eclipse (DDE) and making sure that v.2 supports application development as DDE provides for it. Part of this is getting an overview of how you guys use the application. For this I have created a survey I would like you to fill in.

Thank you in advance.

Click Here to take survey

Custom plug-in builds in Eclipse

Just had an interesting issue where I needed to make sure my Eclipse plug-in had the latest version of a jar-file I build in another Java project. Normally including a jar-file in a plug-in project is easy enough but when doing that you’re normally using a static jar-file that doesn’t change. I needed my plug-in to use the latest jar from the other Java project whenever the plug-in was built. Hmmm….

After some searching around and some hints via Twitter I found the solution and it was very easy as Eclipse already include the plumbing for this (from Eclipse 3.2). The solution was to contribute custom build steps to the build.xml that the PDE in Eclipse auto-generates. It’s way easier than it sounds.

The only changes I needed to make to my plug-in project was to:

  • Add “customBuildCallbacks=customBuildCallbacks.xml” to the build.properties
  • Add a customBuildCallbacks.xml Ant file to my plug-in project (the one that needed the newest jar) with a single target called “pre.gather.bin.parts”
  • Write “code” for the target that replaces the jar-file in my plug-in project with the one from my Java project
  • Build the plug-in via my update site

For full details refer to Plug-in Development Environment Guide/Tasks/PDE Build Advanced Topics/Feature and Plug-in custom build steps in the online help.

Sametime business card data cache

The Sametime client has a cache of the information it has fetched from the business card (aka blackbox) system on a per user basis. This is both the textual data and the image data. In case your Sametime client displays stale data you can do one of two things:

  1. Right-click the contact and select “Refresh Person Info”. This will make Sametime refetch the data from the Sametime server.
  2. Clear the cache from disk.

In some cases option 1 wont work although it’s far far the easiest. I have seen this when changing the person image format (e.g. from jpg til gif). In this case you may need to clear the cache from disk.

So where is this cache? Well if you open the “workspace.metadata.pluginscom.ibm.collaboration.realtime.people.implPersonCache” directory beneath your Notes data directory you’ll see a directory per Sametime community you’re connected to. In each of these directories you’ll find

  • an .index file containing a list of the known users
  • an XML file per user with person info
  • a picture, if any, of the user

If you want to purge the cache for a community you can close the Notes client, clear the contents of the .index file (you may be able to delete the file altogether but I haven’t tried) and delete the xml and image files. When you restart Notes and hover over a Sametime contact the client will refetch the business card data.

Easy.

Lotus: We’ll give you the air cover you need! Humbug, I say! Humbug!

I agree – this is a rant but I’m frustrated – deeply frustrated.

So I was at the Lotusphere 2009 and was happy to hear Kristen Lauria, VP Lotus Marketing, on stage talking about the renewed commitment from IBM Lotus to marketing and about the new SmarterPlanet campaign. IBM was going to provide the air cover we as partners needed. IBM was going to be visible and aggressive. IBM was going to get into to fight. They were shattering windows for God sake!

I was thrilled. The crowd was thrilled. There was a big applause and I think I even heard someone shout. At the blogger executive Q&A I asked Kristen whether this initiative would be coming to Europe and she said yes so I was even more thrilled. It would even be coming to Denmark. Wow.

It’s now been about 5 months and I have seen nothing. Absolutely nothing. IBM Lotus is still as absent from the media as they ever has been. Nothing has changed.

“We’ll give you the air cover you need!” Humbug, I say! Humbug!

As I said I’m frustrated. IBM Lotus has some of the best technology out there and probably the best and most competitive client in the market. Notes 8.5 is arguably the best and most capable Notes client ever. With Notes 8.5 we’re back to Notes being a true platform. Unfortunately customers don’t know it. As business partners we are still on our own and we have to mature and nurture the market our self.

It’s a real shame. I think we would be a lot stronger if IBM sent some air cover and dispatched that air strike we have been crying for for so long… Well – maybe next year.

Sametime blackboxes and CommonField tag – keep your eyes open!

I have written quite a couple of posts about Sametime blackboxes over time on how to write your own and how to configure multiple blackboxes to fetch business card data from multiple sources. I wrote some articles in THE VIEW on the matter and I wrote the backbox used on the Bleedyellow site to fetch business card from Lotus Connections.

One of the critical pieces in the Sametime blackbox puzzle is the <CommonField CommonFieldName=”fieldname”/> tag from the userinfoconfig.xml (the file used to configure the blackbox system). This tag is used to indicate to the blackbox subsystem which field from the primary blackbox should be used to identify the user being queried in subsequent blackboxes. Unfortunately I have seen over the last couple of implementations I have done that this tag cannot be relied upon anymore.

In the last two implementations I have done I’m seeing that the UID from the context being sent to the secondary (and tertiary) blackbox is the distinguished name (i.e. the LDAP DN or Notes DN) rather than the e-mail address is specified in userinfoconfig.xml. These implementations are primarily based on Domino 8.0.2 and Sametime 8.0.1. In these implementations I have had to write code to “re-lookup” the e-mail address in LDAP based on the DN.

I’m trying to get IBM to react to this fact but no luck so far. I’ll keep you posted…

Generating unique id’s for Notes widgets

If you write code to automatically generate widget descriptors (aka extension.xml) for users you have to ensure that the widget id is unique. A nice exxample of this can be found here. One caveat is that the widget id is used to distinguish the widgets hence has to be unique. To easiest way to generate a unique id in Java is to use the java.util.UUID class. Generating a unique, random, id with this class is easy.

String id = java.util.UUID.randomUUID().toString();