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Tue 12 Jun 2018, 02:59 PM

Collabsphere through the years

I am presenting a session at Collabsphere 2018, the successor to the well-respected MWLUG conference which has grown more and more vital over the past few years. If you are in the U.S. or Canada and haven't been able to get over to Engage or other overseas conferences, don't miss this. As an IBM Champion this year, I have had to look around and see which conferences might make sense, and this was an easy choice. Supported by IBM enough to get the inside information, but independent enough to hear more than IBM marketing, this is a conference worth the cost. Not that it costs much. A great hotel rate, negligible entry fee, and a reasonably priced city all make this an easy sell to your company, especially with the critical changes coming to Notes/Domino and the rest.

As for my session, the details are below. I promise it will be a good session, but I also promise you are likely to get even better information by hanging out with me at lunch or chatting in the halls. That is where some of the best discussions happen, and where a lot of the positive changes you'll see in Notes/Domino 10 were bandied about in previous years.

The ROI of Data - Building on your company's existing investment 
Often neglected in the quest for better, faster, easier applications is the invested value in the data, both new and old, that makes your applications more than demoware. Whether converting a Notes client application to a MEAN stack mobile app, or taking an existing Domino web app and building new connections and features, or building reports on a collection of data created and stored by a mixture of applications, there are techniques and methods to get more bang for your buck.

In this session, we will discuss the kinds of data available, not all of it obvious, techniques for normalizing the data for analytics without losing the strengths of NoSQL, and how to unbundle and use data stored in rich text, MIME, attachments and more.

Copyright © 2018 Genii Software Ltd.

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Tue 12 Jun 2018, 01:44 PM
This is the fifth in a series on configuring CKEditor. In my previous post,  I showed how to use a Domino form and view to add doclinks. In this, I'm going to show how to simulate the Notes way of attaching documents along with attachment icons that launch the files. Note: I have used our product, AppsFidelity, for the example. Other topics should be much less product focused, but this seems the best way to demonstrate it..
 
1) Our goal is to create specialized images as attachment icons to launch files as in Notes client
In other words, the first of the following two images is what we want to see on the web, rather than the second which is what we see now.
 
Inline GIF image
 
The default is to add the attachments at the bottom as in this image. This loses context. For example, you can't tell that I added Bonnie's rap sheet first, so the order they are mentioned doesn't match the order they are presented. Iin my example above, the location tells you all you need to know. Imagine the confusion possible when a long document with many attachments is displayed.
 
Inline GIF image
 
 
2) Adding the plugin and dialog
This process is very similar to the Doclink example in the previous post, with one notable exception being that we open the Domino form and save it as a temporary document rather than just reading it.
 
Inline GIF image
 
See in this brief video:
 
 
 
3) How the attachment image is generated
The attachment icon with the text embedded is a challenge. When the file is uploaded to the temporary document, an extra step must generate the attachment icon. This can be accomplished with the C API and an image library. Here, I use AppsFidelity as an extension manager so when the temp document is saved, the image is generated as a second attachment. Then, the HTML inserted in the plug knows where the image will be. Alternately, you could use a web services call or other extension to return the image.
 
Inline GIF image
 
4) How the attachment moves from the temporary document to the original (edited) document
You could leave the attachment in a separate document, but that leads to management and security issues. Instead, on submission of the original document, the save process copies the attachment over, changes the HTML to point internally, and removes the temporary document.
 
 
5) How this looks if opened in Notes client
If you have a web only solution, it doesn't much matter how this works in Notes, but if you did open it, you would have an image with a link to the web document which would then open a browser to open the attachment. To avoid this since we already have an extension manager, we can catch the open from Notes and convert the MIME to rich text with "normal" Notes attachments.
 
Inline GIF image
 
 
6) A multitude of other extensions are possible
Once you open up the idea of actions that reach outside of the local editor, you could have an icon that did a pull request on a stock ticker symbol and inserted a chart, or you could have a dropdown with different boilerplate language which could get inserted, or you could have a translate button which would add (or replace selected content) a translated version. The sky is the limit. The imporatnt thing to realize is that you can extend the toolbar in ways that server your business needs and add capabilities beyond simple rich text manipulation.
 
 
7) Commercial side-note - what AppsFidelity brings to the table 
This file attachment action requires either AppsFidelity or other extensive coding. Subsequent topics in this series will not be similarly focused, but I wanted one last opportunity to invite you to  try AppsFidelity by requesting an AppsFidelity evaluation license. See the ways AppsFidelity can empower your applications, both for web only and web/Notes applications, and for Classic or XPage apps.
 
All topics in the series
 
  

Copyright © 2018 Genii Software Ltd.