11.08.2008

Ye118w Day: Sideshelf-enable your Notes app (without Java)

>>Author:  Thomas Bahn
>>Ort:     Schwentinental (Kiel)

URL: http://www.assono.de/blog/d6plinks/Ye118wDay-Sideshelf-Enable-your-Notes-App-without-Java

Category: Ye118wDay, Lotus Notes, Entwicklung

Today is the first annual Yellow Day!
And I wear yellow, for sure.

In the spirit of this day, I want to show you, how you can sidebar-enable your existing Notes applications without using Java for the Notes 8.0.1 Standard client.

To add a view into the sidebar, is quite easy - using the Widget toolbox buttons. But I needed an input form there, to be able to create new documents conveniently all the time. In my case, it's an application to input and control the times on projects and activities, but it could as easily be a "Contact report" form of a CRM app or the "Event log" form of an IT service app or ...

In the screenshot you can see the result.

You can only add views, documents or frameset to the sidebar directly (at least without manually editing a Notes URL: Creating Form Design Element Sidebar Widgets). Therefore I created a frameset called "Projektaufwand" (sorry for not translating the design of the app, but I haven't the time right now and it's not essential for understanding the technique itself). It contains only one frame, in which a named element - the "Projektaufwand (schmal)" form - is displayed. This is a narrow version of the standard "Projektaufwand" form:

For the "installation" of the frameset into the sidebar, you can temporarily change the start properties of the database to open the "Projektaufwand" frameset, when opening this app in the Notes client.

Then open the database. The frameset and therefore the form are displayed, and the Widget toolbox buttons are active now. Click on the third button:

The form is opened (in the invisible frameset) in the sidebar. Additionally, a new widget is created in the "My Widgets" section of the sidebar.

To add the created widget to the sidebar on startup, you can set the appropriate property of the component:

This way, the form is available to conveniently enter new documents all the time.

There is a small problem left: How do you open a new, empty document in the sidebar after saving another one? Honestly, I don't know.

But I found a workaround: The input form contains a hidden text field "SaveOptions", which is "Computed for Display" with a fixed value of "0". This way, documents can't be saved directly.

Instead of writing an action in the action bar, I created a button "Speichern" (Save), which creates a new document in the back-end, copies all entered values and finally clears the form to prepare it for the next input.

Sub Click(Source As Button)

Dim newDoc As NotesDocument

' validate input
If Not GetBaseController().IsModelValid() Then Exit Sub

' create a new document and copy items
Set newDoc = currentDB.CreateDocument
Call uidoc.Document.CopyAllItems(newDoc)
Call newDoc.RemoveItem("SaveOptions")
Call newDoc.ComputeWithForm(False, False)
Call newDoc.Save(True, True)

' clear this form
Call ClearForm

Call uidoc.Refresh()
End Sub

And that's it. Completely without Java and Eclipse-Plugins you can sidebar-enable your applications for the current Notes client.

By the way, you should adapt the design of the form for the environment: The sidebar is (normally) opened narrowly, thus the form's layout should be quite "vertical". You can optimize it for the edit mode, and it doesn't need to print well.

You can see in the code of the Speichern (Save) button, that I use the same model and controller classes as in the standard "Projektaufwand" form. This way, the validation is guaranteed to be the same, and you can maintain it in only one place.