Genii Weblog
Round tripping, even while staying put
Fri 29 May 2020, 04:22 PM
Tweetby Ben Langhinrichs
I've noticed a couple of people in very different conversations talk about the idea of "round tripping" data, moving it from Notes rich text to HTML or MIME and then bringing it back. Often, this is described more specifically as moving it from "Domino to Mongo DB" or from Notes to SharePoint or simply from "the client to the web". Fundamentally, these all mean more-or-less the same thing. The internal format is Notes rich text. The "external" format is HTML or MIME, and even the MIME is really just HTML packaged differently.
In both conversations where it was mentioned, round tripping was treated as if it were a special case, unusual and not of interest to most Notes/Domino users.
This is simply not true. Round tripping happens every day, and it happens without any special coding or effort. Two of the simplest examples:
1) Send an email to a colleague outside of your domain. After that person replies, reply back. You've gone from rich text to MIME to rich text (again) to MIME (again). Two round trips.
2) Staying entirely in a Notes client, any version including Notes 11, saving a document with a rich text field set to "Store contents as HTML and MIME". Then, open it up to read it. For bonus points, make a change and save it, then open it again. You've gone from rich text to MIME to rich text to MIME to rich text again.
But so what? Obviously, Notes allows you to store content as HTML and MIME, so it must understand it. Right?
Watch the video. All I do is save three documents with rich text fields stored as HTML and MIME, then reopen them. That's it. Watch the chaos which ensues. Then, tune in next week as I start to show the different ways Genii Software has found to make that round trip more pleasant and productive. Because we could all use a pleasant round trip right about now.
(I skipped the audio on this, but the captions should tell you what you need to know. I used HCL Notes 11.0 for this demo.)
Copyright © 2020 Genii Software Ltd.
What has been said: