Blackberry Developer Community

A community forBlackBerry developers has sprung up at:

http://blackberry.developercommunity.com/

It is not officially affiliated with RIM, but there is already some activity on the forums, including a forum dedicated to Domino development with Blackberries.

SNTT: Computing Frame Contents

Frames on the web are out of style, but they are invaluable in Notes programming.  We tend to use a frameset with a single frame for our web applications because of the flexibility it gives us.  One of the things it allows us to do is load different content into the frame in different situations.

In my previous post, I talked about how easy it is to make a database accessible to a BlackBerry.  One of the things we wanted to do, though, is to differentiate what a BlackBerry user sees on first opening the database vs. what someone sees using a browser.  To do this, we computed the content to load into the frame depending on the value returned by @useragent.  So I went into our Frameset and got the frame properties dialog box up.  On the Basics tab, next to the Content Value textbox, I click the @ button to calculate the content.  A dialog box like the following appears:

This dialog box allows you to compute 3 things:

1. the type of element (in this case, a view for a BlackBerry and a form otherwise);
2. the database where the element can be found (blank means the current database);
3. the identity of the element (the view name and form name to correspond to #1).

The power of this feature is limited only by what you can do inside an @if statement.

Astonishingly simple

I don’t have much time to write today, but I wanted to post something about my first foray into programming for the Blackberry.  I took an existing phone directory application and had it working well for the Blackberry in less than an hour!  Domino (as usual) does much of the HTML work for you, and you can detect when a BB is asking for the page so that you can provide special HTML, or even a specific form.  For example, the form formula I use to serve a different form to the BB is:

@If(@Contains(@GetHTTPHeader(“User-Agent”);”BlackBerry”);”BB-Personnel Information”;”Personnel Information”)

The Blackberry specific form is very simple with no tables and no unnecessary graphics (all those hours designing terrible UIs in version 4.6 have finally paid off!).  If you have been hesitating at all, I encourage you to take some baby steps into developing for the Blackberry, as I have.  It is much easier than I ever imagined.  I’m sure it can get trickier and more robust, but it’s nice to get something going so quickly.

For more details, start here.