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.

RedWiki

Here is an announcement that I want to pass along:

An exciting new program is being piloted by the IBM Redbooks team to engage the broad customer and partner community in shared authoring and updating ‘best practices’ information.

The program is called RedWiki.  They are piloting the idea with a wiki on Lotus SmartUpgrade.  If it works, Wikis could become available for other products.

The Whole Lotus Enchilada

We currently run Lotus Notes/Domino, Sametime and Quickplace in our environment.  We do not run Websphere, but we don’t have any other portal software either.  We are in the middle of a project to switch our email to Outlook/Exchange.  We have been told that “as long as we have workflow, we’ll have Notes/Domino” (with the implication that we’ll always have the product).  OTOH, Quickplace (soon to be Quickr) has been under pressure both from Sharepoint and E-Room, and there are rumours that we are going to be moving from Sametime to the Microsoft instant messenger product.

Here is my question:  from a developer perspective, how much should I worry about losing Sametime from the product lineup?  I’ve done some Quickplace work, so I worry a bit about losing that.  If I thought Microsoft had a viable workflow option for Notes, I would also be worried about that.  But while I know that Sametime is (particularly now) an extensible platform, the fact is that I (and my fellow developers) don’t do any Sametime development.  Part of me says that it is just a tool that happens to be from Lotus (like our document managment system is just a tool that happens to be from Interwoven).  Another part of me says that anytime Lotus is removed from our environment that my job as it currently stands is one step closer to vanishing.  I have every reason to believe my company would retrain me, but that is beside the point I’m wondering about.

So, what do any of you think?  In my situation, would you consider the loss of Sametime to be a threat?

Quickplace Capacity Question

I’ve had a project request about using Quickplace to store about 100 GB of data.  Has anyone used QP to store and access this much data?  I’m assuming that we’ll be able to design the structure with plenty of rooms/sub rooms to spread the data among several NSFs, but I’m wondering how the server will handle it.  We have not yet updated to QP 7.0…

So, any thoughts?

Theory into Practice: Layers and Embedded Editors

I saw many good presentations at Lotusphere 2007, but one that was among the most stimulating to my imagination was the one produced by Nathan Freeman and Chris Blatnick.  Since then, they’ve both done some great work on their blogs using UI features I hadn’t used before, particularly layers and embedded editors (Chris’s blog is down right now, so I can’t link to more of his interesting work).

Anyway, one of the challenges I face after a conference is taking the ideas that get sparked during sessions and implementing them in the work I do.  Often it’s easier just to slip back into my standard design toolbag.  But when I saw these things in action, I immediately knew I had a use for them that wouldn’t just be showing off some new skill for the sake of trying it out.

Here’s the situation.  I am designing a database to track diversity requests and related workflow.  Requests can come from a variety of different sources which we generically call “companies.”  The design specifications called for the diversity administrator to enter a new company document with some basic information, then create a new request document, select the company, and then begin the workflow.  This is a classic example of the design needs driving the business process.  We need the company information so that the users don’t have to enter the same data multiple times (as the same company asks for different data, for example).  However, the users aren’t particularly interested in the “company” document; they are interested in the request.

Preventing duplicate submissions

The Situation: We have a database for performance reviews. Reviewees can solicit reviews in the database and reviewers then have the option of creating unsolicited reviews. We want to prevent reviewers from creating duplicates (either two unsolicited for the same person or an unsolicited where a solicited exists already).

The Challenges:  We have mid-year and end-year reviews in this database, so the same reviewer can write one eval in each cycle per reviewee.  If a reviewer tries to create a duplicate evaluation, we have to present the reviewer with the choice to open the existing copy or just to end the creation process.

The Solution:  Checking for duplicates was fairly simple: we have a view with a key of the year, the reviewee, the reviewer and the cycle.  Before document creation, we do a lookup to that view and if the document doesn’t exist, we create it.  The trickier part was how to handle opening it after a prompt.  We decided that the function that creates the document would return a variant string array.  The first entry in the array would hold a message and the second entry would hold a Unid.  If the document is created (no duplicates), the message is blank and the Unid is used to open the document in the UI.  If there is a duplicate, the message returned indicates that a document already exists.  This message is placed in a message box to prompt the user how to proceed.  If they want to open the document, it uses the Unid of the document it found in the view; if they just want to exit creation of the document, the script stops.

The Advantages: We found we could also return error messages or other status messages using the same architecture.  In such a case, if the 2nd return value is empty, the calling code would end after the prompt.

The Disadvantages:  Implementing this was a bit trickier on the web.  We return much of this information in the URL of the document so that the web client can then perform the prompts.  We have less control over message boxes on the web, so we had to re-craft the message depending on client type.  On the other hand, having the Unid already made opening the document a simple URL rather than using a WQS to go get a document.

Overall:  We’ve found this to be a pretty flexible design.  If we ever needed to return a third (or fourth, fifth, etc.) value, we could easily add that to the return array without breaking existing code.

Sametime Spellcheck Strangeness

Sametime 7.5 has spellcheck, and that is an excellent addition to a business chat client.  What is strange, though, is that the spell checker doesn’t run just as words are typed, but as letters are typed.  So as I type a long word, the spell checker continuously tells me the word is misspelled when really it is only incomplete.  This can be very distracting when a word starts with another word.  Take, for example, the word “business.”  Here is what you would get as you type:

b (error)
bu (error)
bus (valid)
busi (error)
busin (error)
busine (error)
busines (error)
business (valid)

Those red squiggles grow, then vanish, then grow some more before finally vanishing.  It’s quite disconcerting to my eyes, and if it bothers me, I’m sure it bothers others.  I’ve also noticed that there is sometimes a lag as spell check tries to keep up.

Needless to say, I’ve turned off the automatic spellcheck.  I can still check an individual message before I send it, so it is still a nice feature.  I hope, though, in future releases they will stop spellchecking by the character and do it by the word instead.

The Bugs-Enhancement Continuum

I’m visiting the home office this week for meetings on a big project on which I’m the lead developer.  Typically our February meeting are to plan the expansion and new enhancements for the coming year.  Things are different this year because our budget has been cut and we’ve been told not to do any new development.  So for the first time we are forced to talk about what we are not going to do rather than what we are going to do.

Some things are obviously on the “to do” list: bug fixes.  If something doesn’t work as it should, we’ll fix it.  Some things are obviously on the “not this year” list:  anything that is brand new.  The tricky part is drawing the line in the grey area.  What about things that work, but could work better?  What about manual database processes that could be further automated?  What about UI changes that may enhance usefulness, but don’t actually affect functionality?  These are some of the issues we are discussing this week.

There are also some philosophical issues we are struggling with, particularly how hardline to be on our interpretation of “no new development.”  On the one hand, we want to keep this database as a major useful tool for the firm.  On the other hand, if we do too much work, why would they ever restore our budget in future years?  One thought has been to spend some time doing back-end work we’ve wanted to do that will enhance the maintainablility of the database, but it won’t be seen by the users.  I like the idea, though part of me thinks it is cheating.  I’d like to have the work done, but I wonder if the powers that be would prefer me working on something else.  I don’t know what all will be decided, but it’s an interesting beginning to what is sure to be an interesting year for this project.