If you thought that the MyWidgets sidebar plug-in is doing some kind of dark magic to dynamically add sidebar plug-ins then think again. The purpose of my latest exploration into the World of Eclipse was to find out how I could do the same stuff. It wasn’t easy and took a while but it proved to be easier than I thought (once I knew how of cause). The plug-in I did is rather simple but shows how to dynamically add sidebar plug-ins and associate actions with it much like MyWidgets. If you want to see how it works check out the Flash movie. Now this has amazing possibilities…
As always – this isn’t your ol’ Notes client… 🙂
That’s only possible in the 8.5 client right? Not possible in 8.0.2 and earlier?
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I haven’t tried in Notes 8.0.x but I don’t see why not. I guess I’m using the same capabilities as the MyWidgets stuff which came in Notes 8.0.1 so… 🙂
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Forgot to say that it’s all Eclipse – no IBM apis are involved.
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Code? Code? Code? Stop teasing me 🙂
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Looks like dynamic extension registration in Eclipse. Works also well for menu entries (Action sets and Control sets). We use that technique in our MindPlan application.
And we’ve got code for this in the samples of our Lotusphere session (AD303 – Leveraging 3rd Party and Legacy Components in IBM Lotus Notes Composite Applications):
http://blog.mindplan.com/mindplan/blog.nsf/dx/09.02.2009152746KLEJYF.htm
With that you can register any extension dynamically at runtime – in this case here the code for the sidebar contribution.
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That is very cool stuff.
It also reminds me of something that bugs me about the Widget used to display web pages in the Sidebar — there’s no “Back” button. So if you click a link in a Sidebar web page you can’t go back. Windows has a keyboard combo that will do it (control left-arrow maybe?), but I can’t find anything on the Mac.
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That’s some quote, Julian.
"I can’t find anything on the Mac"!
😉
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Yes finally they admit it… 🙂
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LOL. Yeah, I’ll openly admit that I can’t find things on the Mac. It’s strange to be a computer noob again, after so many years…
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