Interesting wee additional method for Lotusscript (yes you read that right)

Well I never!
Yes you did read the title of this post correctly I have discovered a NEW thing in Lotusscript.
I know I too had to sit down and have a long cup of tea and a biccie to recover from the shock not only that there is something new but (a) it is useful and (b) it works really well.



I speak of  NotesView.ReSortView("columnname",AscendingFlag)


Now what this does, although not explicit in the help is , if you have a view and the columns have the "Click on column headers to sort = Both" turned on you can in Lotusscipt ask the view to be Resorted based on the programatic name of the column you want the view to be sorted on.

You do not have to set the column to be sorted by default (this reducing what could be a VERY silly view size) you just have to have the "Click column headers to sort = BOTH" turned on.

What this meant to me was I could have a web agent that returns data to an AJAX request that was sorted in a user defined way at the click of a button!! FANTASIC no more messing around with empty documentcollections, sorting lists and adding the documents from the orginal back into the empty collection. All I needed to do was

Call MyView.ReSortView("OrderQuantity",True) 
to sort the view into the order I wanted and deliver it to the wating browser.

The Second parameter is TRUE = Ascending or FALSE = Descending. A word of caution on this param, it appears not to be accessible when you pass it as a variable. You need to pass it as an actual value rather than a Boolean Variable.Also if you have something other than "Click on column headers to sort = Both" this second variable is ignored and the view is sorted on what ever you have set as the value for "Click on column headers to sort"

Really very useful for fiddling with views.. THANK YOU the Dev team in IBM :)

.o0( Why shosuld I use Browser Prefixes in CSS ?)

Browsers don't ya just love em? We wait with baited breath for each new iteration of our favourite window onto the internet and with each new version we devs get new toys to play with. Now the Browser writers (well all of them except the ****wits that write IE) like the new stuff that is coming down the tuvbes from the W3C however there are things that are no yet at Cadidate Recommentation status, so they add a browser specific prefix in front of the property so that the particular rendering engine can process it. For example the -mox-border-radius is the Mozilla (Firefox, Camino and Flock) version of the border-radius  property.

The prefixes are:

1. -khtml- for Konqueror rendering engine KHTML
2. -ms- for IE's rendering engine Trident
3. -moz- for Firefox,Camino and Flock's engine Mozilla
4. -o- for Opera, Opera Mobile, Opera Mini, Nintendo Wii engine Presto
5.  -webkit- Safari, Mobile Safari, Chrome,Android engine webkit.

So why do these boyos exist? Well it allows the rendering engineers to "play" with new properties and values before they are finalised which is a good way for them to be tested in the wild and then corrected and tweaked as required. If they were just to jump straight in they would then be locked into that behaviour for ever. Devs like me would start making curvey corners and using partially opaque PNGs and quite rightly expect that when the browsers updated that particular behaviour would continue to work in a standard way.from that point onward. If the browser changed the standard property for whatever reason, buggy or a W3C spec change then lots of websites could potentially stop working as expected ... so they use the prefixes to get around this.  Have a look at Prefix or Posthack by Eric Meyer for an example of this actually happening.

CSS has long been a country full of "hacks" and kludges that rely on bugs in rendering engines most completely unrelated to the property you want to "hack" which are used to get the browser to do what you want it to do.


So you can use both the standard unrefixed property in your CSS and use the prefixed version as well, this means that as the property becomes a standard an impliemented in the same way over all the browsers your precious web pages will not break. It should be noted that IE9's prefixes are a bit "odd" at the minute for lots of properties they decided to jump straight into the standard and hope that the W3C doesn't change the spec!

div {
                  -moz-transform: rotate(45deg);
                  -o-transform: rotate(45deg);
                  -webkit-transform: rotate(45deg);
                  transform: rotate(45deg)
}

In the code aboveI am rotating a [DIV] element thru 45 degrees and I am covering the main browsers (inc IE9) However .. all this repitition will lead to large css files. It really would be so much nicer to have one single entry and have done with it. Well there is a way around this using a CSS pre-processor. SASS is one and LESS and eCSSTender to name 3. However by hiding prefixes with pre-processors devs may forget that they are using "experimental" properties that are likely to change when they are infact nothing of the kind. Also the Pre-Processor comes with a browser overhead and process overhead on the user's PC which becomes more noticeable on complex pages,

As time progresses you can remove the browser prefixs from your CSS, which is MUCH easier than "unhacking" css using the older hacks that relied on browser bugs.

A minor annoyance of using prefixes is that they do not validate and in DDE this can be a pain and can hide real errors in your CSS. to get around this I generally have two CSS files.. one with the pristine Standard CSS and one with the prefixes. There is an extra HTTP request hit here, but it does make debugging easier during testing.

So there you have it Prefixes .. next time I will have a think about coping with browsers that don't support CSS3

.o0( ok Why CSS3? )

Since the dawn of the first browser CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) have been evolving with progressive enhancements that allow developers more and more "design" options when designing a web site and the most recent iteration of this standard is CSS3 and having been playing with it on a couple of "new build" projects over the last couple of months and it has to be said I am impressed. Very Impressed!

The new techniques inherent in CSS3 give the developer more advantages over the older alternate more hacky methods. They extend the developer toolkit and in doing so bring the web-pages we create closer to the idea of a "web app" that looks and performs exactly like a desktop app.

Used correctly CSS3 can totally replace images, for example drop-shadows can now be done with CSS so you no longer have to design, place and download PNG or GIF images to get this effect. If you client wants to see what it looks like a little darker, a little further or wants it as a neon purple glow no longer do you have to hit GIMP or Photoshop a simple change to the CSS style is all that is required.

Some CSS allows you to do away with Javascript functions or Embedded Flash Objects which can be ackward to code for every browser particuklarly now we have to provide for a myriad of mobile browsers as well as desktop ones.

CSS3 also can reduce your markup by requiring fewer and less complex DIVs and associated Classes. for example you can now load multiple background images into a single Element so you do not have to have nested internal DIVs each one styled differently. Also and IMHO most markedly you can now target elements in the DOM directly based on their position in the document tree.

[All the above comes with the presupposition that all versions of IE are shit shit shit shit shit]

Having said that I have discovered that there are "the right tools for the job" and sometimes although the CSS3 technique is dead cool and sexy doing it using Javascript can sometimes do it more efficently and with less development time. So basically watch out and if CSS3 can do something quicker and more efficently use it otherwise .. well use your common sense. ;-)

I will endeavour over the next couple of posts to throw out some both my "oooooo!" and the less frequent "oh bollox!" moments that I have had with CSS3 over the past few months and perhaps spur you on to have a look at what I think is a definite gain to the art of web design.