Notes Client Tip - Dragging and Dropping documents into a calendar

I was asked today the following question,

Why can't we drag a customer from a customer list onto our Customer Visit Calendar and make an appointment with them that way?

Good question. We already have that functionality on the web interface. Popup a customer list, select the customer or customers from the list and drag them to the day you want to schedule the visit and it auto creates the document for that customer on the day you dragged the document(s) onto.

I sucked my pencil for a bit, scratched various bits of my anatomy that would not be misconstrued by my colleagues as offensive and hummed and ahhed. I pinged Julian Robichaux and bounced the idea off him. Can I drag docs which are not calendar docs from an embedded view on a page (or form) onto calendar view embedded on the same form and create a document or documents based on the QueryDragDrop event of the calendar based on the documents that I had dropped.

Julian confirmed my initial thoughts that this was a non-runner because when a view is embedded you can't seem to access the drag drop events - BUMMER! So I then mentioned a word not mentioned in polite society much these days and to give Julian credit it didn't finch or berate me in any way. "What about Framesets?" I said

After a bit of futtering about we discovered that yes you could accecss the Drag and Drop events from FrameA to FrameB and Joy of Joys the CurrentView in the UIWorkspace FrameB's QueryDragDrop event was the view from FrameA! _ YIPEE!

I took my leave of Julian with much thanking and promises of beer and proceeded to have a bit of a debug to see what I could do.

I created a wee test NSF with two forms CUSTOMER and CALENT
Followed by a View of just the CUSTOMER forms and a Calendar view of the CALENT forms
A Frameset was created and in the LHS frame I popped CUSTOMER view and in the RHS frame CALENT calendar view.

On the CALENT view's QueryDragDrop I entered some code and had a ferret about in
what was an what was not passed, this is what I found out.

If you grab one doc from the CUSTOMER view and drop it over the calendar, then there are no documents in the UIView.Documents collection, there is a CaretNoteID that links to the dragging document in the UIView.

If you select more than one document from the CUSTOMER view and drag it over the Calendar then the UIView.documents collection contains the documents you selected.
If you actually select (the wee tick in the gutter) one document the UIView.documents will contain that one document, but you cannot count on users doing that.

Sub Querydragdrop(Source As Notesuiview, Continue As Variant)

Dim ThisSession As New NotesSession
Dim ThisDB As notesdatabase
Dim ThisUI As New NotesUIWorkspace
Dim ThisUIV As NotesUIView
Dim ThisDC As notesdocumentcollection
Dim OldDoc As NotesDocument
Dim NewDoc As NotesDocument

Set ThisDB = ThisSession.CurrentDatabase
Set ThisUIV = ThisUI.CurrentView
' *** Test to see if the view I am dragging from is the calendar or the customer list
If ThisUIV.ViewName <> "Calendar" Then
Set ThisDC = ThisUIV.Documents
'*** Well you must have dragged SOMETHING to fire the event so get it from
'*** from the CaretNoteId
If ThisDC.Count = 0 Then
Set OldDoc = ThisDB.getDocumentById(ThisUIV.CaretNoteID)
Set NewDoc = New NotesDocument(ThisDB)
NewDoc.Form = "CalEnt"
NewDoc.Customer = OldDoc.Customer(0)
NewDoc.City = OldDoc.City(0)
NewDoc.Date = Source.CalendarDateTime
NewDoc.Time =Format(Now,"hh:mm")
NewDoc.Status = "Planned"
Call NewDoc.Save(True,False)
Else
Set OldDoc = ThisDC.GetFirstDocument
Do While Not (OldDoc Is Nothing)
Set NewDoc = New NotesDocument(ThisDB)
NewDoc.Form = "CalEnt"
NewDoc.Customer = OldDoc.Customer(0)
NewDoc.City = OldDoc.City(0)
NewDoc.Date = Source.CalendarDateTime
NewDoc.Time =Format(Now,"hh:mm")
NewDoc.Status = "Planned"
Call NewDoc.Save(True,False)
Set OldDoc = ThisDC.GetNextDocument(OldDoc)
Loop
End If
Else
'*** This is the calendar and I am moving docs around inside it
Set ThisDC = ThisUIV.Documents
If ThisDC.Count = 0 Then Exit Sub
Set OldDoc = ThisDC.GetFirstDocument()
Do While Not (OldDoc Is Nothing)
OldDoc.Date = Source.CalendarDateTime
Call OldDoc.Save(True,False)
Set OldDoc = ThisDC.GetNextDocument(OldDoc)
Loop
End If
Call ThisUI.ReloadWindow()

End Sub

This code allows the user to drag a customer (with or without tick selction) or customers from the customer list in the left hand frame onto the calendar and create a calendar entry for that customer on the dropped on date. The user can also safely drag and drop calendar entries around inside the calendar.

Useful and cool. :-)

I have popped the NSF up here so if you are interested in seeing it in action you can have a go.

Enjoy ...

The Lotus Notes Client outside the Organisation - an Idea

I was having a bit of a chinwag with several of our Notesian colleagues around the letter published on the HMNL blog by Ian J Free addressed to Steve Mills of the IBM Software group. His open letter presents a case for IBM to transform the Notes.Domino product line into and Open Source, Community Developement Offering.

It is an interesting post that makes some challenging points, some of which I agree with other whilst interesting I cannot see either happening or being sucessful were they to be actioned by IBM but that may just be me being cynical ... but go have a read at the letter and make your own mind up.

However this did set me to thinking. I was asked on Thursday last week by a colleague at work "Is it possible to use Notes Client at home as his mail /PIM client?" when pushed for a reason why he wanted to do that his response was that he was used to using notes for email, tasks,calendar , journals and other out of the box templates at work and he would like to have continuity between work and home (where he used Outlook). Mostly he WAS that impressed with the Notes V8 client (V8.0.2). Needless to say the cost put him off.

Which made me wonder if this idea would fly?
When you get a proper license for Notes at work, why not have a "If-you-want-you-can-use-it-at-home" license as well, this would be a SMTP/POP client with no links into the company Notes domain(s).

With the advent of Symphony which I have installed on quite a few home PCs for friends and relatives as a much much more functional (and free) replacement for M$ Works (which seems to come bundled with every PC at the minute) why not have a SMTP/POP notes client in symphony with contacts,mail,tasks and calendar. It wont need all the bells and whistles of the full client as it is never going to talk to a server, but will allow the home user to build a relationship with Notes that moves beyond the @work sphere of their lives. It is the relationship that users have built with M$ products at home that is part of the interia that has and still slows acceptance of Lotus products in the work place.

I know I could "sell" this concept to lots of users at work and many more from home.

Anyway it was just a thought...

** Update ** I have popped an idea onto IdeaJam if you want to vote on this idea ..

Interesting Notes Based Application - DOCOVA

All Notes-ers

I have just had a chat with a Canadian chap Gary Walsh from DLI who have a very interesting product called Docova I must add at this point that this post is not an advert or endorsement! However I did have a few "wow" moments when Gary Demo'ed it for me on Tuesday.

It is a Document Management System that is back ended by Notes NSFs and can be accessed thru the Notes Client and from a browser. It comes with a host of interesting bells and whistles and is priced very reasonably and it is well worth the time to have a look at their site. Particularly the 3 videos in the panel on the right that give a high level explanation/tour of the product.

If you are interested Gary does a good presentation and does not play the "pushy salesman" (an instant turn off for me) so don't be afraid to give him a buzz or drop him a line (contact details on the Docova site)

The "current economic climate" does not allow me at this time to think about a budget for Docova for my own Notes domains but Gary's contact details have gone into the "definitely keep" folder

Strange Errors from 8.0.1 when creating a document from another document

Today was punctuated by news that the world was broke and the fact that I got the same really strange message twice in the same day from my Notes 8.0.1 client on my laptop. The error in question is "No document found in that direction" and it appeared when I tried to FORWARD a message.

Having just returned from my trip to Paris and being a little tired I took the message at it's most simpilist and tried turning the screen thru 90 degrees. However there was not document there either.

The first message came from my mail file I did a design replace as I like to fiddle with the design and it was very possible that I had broken it myself. I did a design replace and the error went away and I gave it very little more thinking cycles until it was reported at happening again in a very large app that workflows sample requests that we get from our customers and web site from the users I had recently upgraded in Paris. I went and had a look see on the dev server and yes the problem existed there too.

Basically there is a "parent doc" on which is a button that created as "child" response doc that inherits a few fields and presents the user with a new form. The code behind the form was simple.

@command([filesave]);@command([compose];"SampleDetail")

I did some digging about on the web and there it was in the V8 forum sadly there isn't a lot iof detail and it seem that this is only addressed in the V8.5 not 8.0.2. Like the user who reported the problem I got around it by converting the action to LS, thankfully there are only a few inherited fields and they were relatively simple.

What is a tad worring is that the REPLY + FORWARD options in the mail file (the forward one crapped out on me today) aren't ones we as Dev's can get at.. so how did I get the error this morning and what did the design replace do to make it go away? Hmmmmmmmmm

A Lazy Dev Tip To Stop M$ LookOut Wrapping Notes Nice long URL links in messages

If you have a project that sends mail to those poor benighted souls that use M$ LookOut for their mail and they are suffering from wrapped and snafued long Notes URL links. Here is a tip that will allow your links to pass into the lands of the Redmond gnomes unmolested with bugger all fiddling about.

Yes I know you can do it with HTML mail, but sometimes life is just to short.

Put your URL in quotes like this "" and M$ will leave it be when it arrives.

Thanks to a very nice M$ techie Eric for the tip!

Back From Myrtle Beach

I have returned from the rather hot , but pleasant environs of Myrtle Beach, USia. Where whilst everything did not according exactly to plan. the general consensus that V8 was "kewl" and ".. when can I have it?". What was purely an application server up until now has been upgraded to V8 and a pilot team of users have been moved from "LookOut" to Notes and are giving it a "good seeing to" (as they say in Norn Iron). So for the only negative comment has been "ohh I can't drag and drop the addresses on an email like I could in ....." and if memory serves this has been addressed in 8.5

Other things I learned

American beer from micro brewers is good stuff!

There is a famous American pop-singer called Jimmy Buffet and he has lost his salt shaker- Who knew?

There is a pale green drink called a "Margaretta" which is very popular but needs salt to make it taste nice.. or so i am told. Hence the aforementioned Mr Buffet's inconsolable sadness at being bereft of salt shakers.

It is considered impolite to laugh at the "No concealed firearms" sign outside iHop.

There is a legal requirement for Pancake Houses to a have a beachwear shop on at least one side.

Almost the entire GDP of Myrtle Beach can be measured in TeeShirts, shorts, pancakes and beer.

Southern USian business meetings are basically 2 hours of Northern Ireland content which in America elongates to 2 days (eddy in the space time continuum perhaps? or more simply we heathen Northerners have to move faster to keep warm).

America ladies who say "You are cute ... you look like Shrek ... but you are cute"
are basically lulling you into a sense of security so they can metaphorically knee you in the nuts.

Hip Hip hooray and trice hooray! for Air Conditioners apart from the one in room 503 of the Hilton on Broadway at the Beach. Which had two settings ARTIC and ABSOLUTE ZERO and no noticeable OFF switch. This meant enduring the odd experience of wearing socks and PJs in bed whilst the outside temp was 90-100 degrees. I do love a good juxtaposition, but REALLY???

Back to work tomorrow ~sigh~

Time for a Coffee methinks

LotusScrript classes for Symphony?

Simple question - Where are the classes for manipulating Symphony docs from Notes and vice a versa. For the life of me I can't find any mention of them and I am sure there must be, why have a "Office Beating" family of products that can't talk to one another?

Thinking about Views, particularly large ones

A few weeks ago i blogged about very large datasets in views, that post came from a desire to maximize performance without usability in a web client. Nathan Freeman amongst others pointed out that very large views should really have a filtering system in both the notes client and on the web.

Thinking about this yes the notes client does make you lazy, categorized views work are easy to get around in, users are used to them and we as developers sometimes fall prone to following the path of least (in this case user) resistance.

So over the past few weeks I have been doing some head scratching about the whole UI thing. Spurred on by posts that posted this toon about design I have tried to do some paper prototypes about a new way (for me) of looking at view navigation.

Needless to say I tried to avoid thinking about coverlfow for fear of band wagon jumping .. that and I having used it on my own iPlod the novelty lasted about a week mainly caused by to many albums to be able to recognize all the covers that and i couldn't be arsed spending the time to get the album art. The more I ignored it the more I came back to variants of the same thing as a potential good idea.

This is the idea I have is something like this:
When the control is unloaded it looks like Fig 1
The user selectes "Content" or "Actions"

Clicking "Content" loads the scroll to The first Level Document types like in Figure 2. For Example approvals , requests etc

Clicking on the scroller moves thru the choices

Clicking on the picture loads the Scroller with the next level down of categorisation.

Using keys or the mouse wheel moves the user thru the levels ... no quite sure how this would work.. prob via a cache.




There would also be a breadcrumb trail below the control So the user would have a visual representation of where they were.

Keyboarders could type "App.." and the scroller would postion the flow at Approvals and you could also use <- and -> to navigate thru the options.

Clicking on Actions would do give the user a list of actions available like .. Create new .. Email to .. etc that would be used in the same way.

Below the control there would be the space where the results of the user selection would appear in table form.

I know this is do-able with a composite application. But i am thinking of doing this all in JS so that the V6 and V7 population can us it as well.

I have the cover flow bit 70% done (for the web) the resizing animations are proving awkward in JS, but i will have a play over easter and see if I can get to grips with that. I am still not sure whether this will be a runner usability wise .. there is rather a lot of clicking

If I manage to get something working i will pop it onto OpenNtf and let the world play with it

Widgeting your journal so that you get just a view without the frameset

I have been fiddling around and I could'nt make head nor tail of getting a view to open all by itself without the accompanying frameset. I have tried working out the URL syntax, but i gave up after a while and did this instead, which is a kludge but it works.

01. Created a less cluttered view in the journal file called sidebar, very minimalist
02. Changed the Application Properties so that the designated frame was ViewFrame
03. Opened the Jorunal file.. which now has a single panel frameset
04. Selected VIEW , Goto and select the minimalist Sidebar View
05. Click on the configure widget from current context icon which will be available
06. Select open a notes view of frameset option and accept the string that has appeared
07. Click Next
08. Give the widget a name
09. Select display as a sidebar panel
10. Click Finish
11. 02. Changed the Application Properties so that the designated frame was back to BorderFrame
You now have a VIEW only widget without the frameset.

Installing V8.0.1 Lotus Client on a PIII-600-EB with 512Mb on XP pro SP2

All,
It was a blowly mizzly pishy rotten day today with no rugby (that i wanted to watch) so I amused myself by digging out an old Intel PIII box. The box in question is of known origin (ie i assembled it) There are some dark recesses where geriatric kit is still used and I wanted to see would it work.

Spec: PIII 600Mhz EB (133MHz bus and 256K L2 on die) running on an Asus CUSL2 815e motherboard, in standard fettle (no over clocking) with 512Mb memory (2x128 and 1x256MB) 40Gb IDE HD.

I popped a clean copy of XP Pro SP2 onto it and the proceed to do a clean install of
the Basic V801 client which although it took an AGE to uncompress (11Mins!) installed without a hitch or complaint in 7mins

After the initial fiddling around to get the client configured, starting and stopping was not startling... 98s from launch to password and then another 15s to the client totally open. Opening a mail file (inbox loaded with around 100 mails, all docs around 1000) was predictably sluggish around 90s, but once open performance was adequate without breaking any records.

Having done all that I copied out the mail file ... un-installed the basic client and did an install of the full client, (ie everything that was possible was installed)
This took 35mins to unpack !!! and the install itself was 16mins. I configed the client,I copied my test mail file back in, pointed the client at it, configed up the sametime to talk to BleedYellow and then opened the client expecting it to load in a time that would allow me to make and drink 2 cups of coffee, vacuum the house and wash the car. I was pleasantly surprised when it opened in 2mins 45s, working with it was a bit more of a chore, things like opening and sending mail took 3-5 seconds longer that the basic client (on a decent box these were instantaneous) and when typing there was occasionally a lag where nothing happened and then suddenly you got 4 or 5 words all in a rush. There was considerable disk IO to begin with so I left it for 30 mins (to do the the vacuuming before divorce was mentioned) and when I returned the disk IO had dropped back to normal background behavior and subsequent stop and starts of the client had between 10 and 15 mins of rabid disk activity that settled down and allow almost-normal working.

The productivity pack worked well once it had started ... IBM could have been more creative with their splash screen, a few jokes, a risque picture or two .. would have been nice as would perhaps some background music :) Again it suffered from a period of intense disk activity which settled down and normal service resumed.

A word of warning DO NOT USE ITUNES while running Notes on an old machine I did and both just die! However iSeries Client Access, TN5250 telent, splurd and even an monster exHell spreadsheet worked within acceptable levels .... just ... with the v8.0.1 client running in the background.

One thing that was rather annoying was the "you have new mail" which when it popped up froze everything for perhaps 10s. No amount of clicking would make the ***** thing go away and then poof everything was back to normal.

All the extra bells and whistles worked as expected... Threads in your inbox took a heartbeat longer to expand and contract.

Does anyone know if the productivity tools run in the same thread pool as the client if active, cos if you have the notes client active or the productivity tools active when you start the other, the start time noticeably improves, so you really only take and excessive "yawn" period where you can memorize the licensing blurp on the splash screen when you start either for the first time.

While I would not recommend you rolling out v801 onto an entire organization that uses old kit, if you do have the odd poor benighted soul in some dark corner that needs the client and all the whizzbangery, I think there is no overpowering reason not to install it. Yes it will be slow, yes it does make your HD sound like a F1 at full revs for a while, but it is workable.

Slaun