Lord Lotus Blog - Category : None

Notes Standard - how to turn off composite application display

Mike Sobczak — Wed, 6 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0400

I have some users who like the Standard client, but don't like how long it takes to load their mail as a composite application. What they'd like to do is have the mail file render in "basic" mode, but also be able to use the sidebar and the new embedded Sametime client.

Is there an easy way to change the mail file so that it displays without the composite application features in Notes Standard?

Lotus Knows - how to annoy developers!

Mike Sobczak — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:16:22 -0400

Sorry for my swipe at the current marketing campaign, but I spent the last hour finding that Notes won't do something I thought would be a no-brainer.

I wanted to create a frameset that displays framesets from two external databases. So, in Database A, frame1 points to Database B, and frame2 points to Database C. Each frame uses a formula that retrieves the path to the external database from a profile document. Turns out that the Notes client won't render a frameset that contains more than one computed frame to an external database. One computed frame works just fine. And it all displays properly in Domino Designer. Ugh!

I even tried using Notes URLs, but Domino Designer doesn't allow Notes URLs for a Frame URL. I found that I could get this to work if I use the folder icon to select each database and frameset within the frame properties. I'm glad that I got something to work but I really wanted to use a compted formula for each frame in the frameset so that I'm not left with a hard-coded solution.

The problem is still there in Notes 8.5 too.

How the Notes client resolves database links

Mike Sobczak — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:47:31 -0400

I currently work for a client that has employed a distributed Domino infrastructure. Databases typically reside on up to twenty servers. Unfortunately, whenever specific users click on a doclink to a database they've never accessed before, they end up with an icon on the first server listed alphabetically in the domain.

Several Domino administrators I've worked with in the past explained to me what was happening, but I'd never seen any official documentation on this. So, I spent a decent amount of time today looking for documentation on this particular facet of Notes/Domino. Thankfully, ~~someone~~ JY Riverin in the Notes 8.5 Discussion forum pointed me in the right direction:

How does Notes determine which replica to use with @Command([FileOpenDBRepID]) or a database link?

What's even more interesting is that the Designer Help doco for the FileOpenDBRepID @Command, makes no mention of the Catalog/domain search server setting in the Location document, or that the Domain Catalog comes into play.

Now that I have an official technote, I will be working with my client to possibly use policies to remedy this situation. Why the information in the above technote hasn't been incorporated into the Help databases is inconceivable!

Use JavaScript control and dojo widgets: plot thickens

Mike Sobczak — Fri, 5 Jun 2009 11:30:09 -0400

I did some testing and narrowed down what is happening. When you select the new Use JavaScript Control Display setting for a rich text field, Domino automatically adds dojo includes to your HTML Header. Domino's code is in blue. The code I'm adding via my own $$HTMLHead field is in green:

My guess is the dojo.registerModulePath() function is cancelling out the dojo stuff I include. I tried to register the dojo stuff again using the following, to no avail:

I found some more info on registerModulePath() here and here, but I admit I have no clue on what I'm doing. I need to submit a PMR on this.

(I converted the HTML/Javascript using this utility.)

Adding bullets to paragraph styles in Lotusscript

Mike Sobczak — Wed, 3 Jun 2009 19:18:20 -0400

I can't believe that in 2009, with version 8.5, we still can't programmatically add bullets to a Rich Text Field!

I know, Genii has a solution for this. But how hard can it be to add simple bullet capability to the NotesRichTextParagraphStyle object? We can apply fonts to the NotesRichTextStyle objects, after all, as well as bold, underline, strikethrough, colors, ...

Notes newsletter question

Mike Sobczak — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:17:47 -0400

One nice feature that’s been in Notes since Notes 4 is the ability to create a newsletter agent using simple actions.

You can set up the newsletter agent to go against all documents in a categorized view. The simple action will automatically break with each category found. You can dynamically determine the recipients (To, CC, BCC), the Subject and the Body using formula code.

This is all well and good. Its a nice and easy way for end users to create newsletters without knowing how to code. However, since the newsletter agent is driven by simple actions, there isn’t a way to handle errors that may arise when the agent runs. For example, one of my clients had several agents that were set up to send newsletters to the people included in a field in each document. The agent generated errors when one of the recipients was no longer in the address book.

I’d like to rewrite the agent so that it can properly handle errors, namely logging them for follow-up and e-mailing the database owner about the errors. There is a NotesNewsletter class available in LotusScript, but it doesn’t create the same newsletter that the simple action does.
For example, here’s the simple action newsletter driven off of a categorized view:

And here’s the Lotusscript equivalent:

The problem with the Lotusscript newsletter class is it doesn’t use the view columns associated with the document. It only includes the doclink and the field you define as the subject or title within the document.

What I would like to do is rewrite the simple action newsletters as Lotusscript newsletters. To duplicate the table header and tabbed spacing used by the newsletter simple action would require me to create a rich text table. I can do that, but I was wondering if someone has already done this. Has anyone heard of an open source solution for this?

Expanded DXL support in 7.0.2 - really?

Mike Sobczak — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:37:47 -0400

In the ReadMe for 7.0.2, the documentation states:

New elements for Shared Columns, Shared File Resources, and Shared Stylesheet Resources have been added.

Which is all nice in good. But the NotesNoteCollection object wasn't updated to allow us to select these specific design elements. So how do I export a view and all of its shared columns using NotesDXLExporter?

The coup de grace: The Top 25 Signs of a Dysfunctional Workplace

Mike Sobczak — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Not to be outdone by the previous seventeen signs of team dysfunctionality, I have twenty-five more warning signs!

Scarlet Pruitt describes the damage in an article on HR World. For your convenience, here's what to watch out for:

Nothing can get done without the boss's approval.
Nothing can get done unless employees go behind the boss’s back.
No one is sure who the boss really is.
No one is getting paid on time — or at all.
Cubicle mates IM (instant message) each other but never talk.
No one contributes in meeting because everyone is busy IM-ing.
Too many pointless meetings are being held.
There's more than one "secret couple" on staff.
Attorneys outnumber staff.
Reward system? What reward system?
The IT head gets arrested for hosting porn on company servers.
IT rules are so strict that you’re not allowed to know your own computer login.
Your boss — an eccentric Internet millionaire — offers to pay your monthly salary in gold coins because "gold is more stable than the dollar."
Your manager was hired because she listed "whiskey" as a hobby on her r�sum�.
Your co-worker decides to show, not tell, the visiting U.K. executive what a "wedgie" is at an office holiday party.
The boss takes pride in his "wall of shame," where employee mistakes are posted and circled in red for the entire world to see.
The boss screams at the assistant when there's skim milk instead of half-and-half in the coffee.
Emergency drills are conducted without employees being told that it's a drill.
At least once per week, you hear quiet sobbing from an adjacent cubicle.
Entire departments go to lunch together every day, leaving parts of the company completely unmanned for hours at a time.
What matters is not what you’ve accomplished in a day, but how many hours you were seen "working."
The accounting department has accumulated 23 weeks of paid vacation because no one there has ever taken a day off.
Managers are CCd on every company email, even when it’s just about where to order lunch.
The only way someone can get promoted is if a senior staff member dies.
No one ever gets fired, no matter how ineffective they are at their job.

Wow! Glad I don't at a company where #21 & #25 are the rule of law. Sounds like a government job! ; + )

Is IBM Lotus asleep at the wheel? What is up with $ConflictAction???

Mike Sobczak — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:48:59 -0400

I can't believe that the Merge Conflicts form property (or $ConflictAction = "1") hasn't been working since 6.5.1:

SPR# AMON6DZJRW - Item merging not working correctly in all situations.

And if that doesn't give you the cold shivers, its still broken in 7.0.3 and 8.0:

'Merge Replication Conflicts' does not work as expected in Notes 7.0.3 or 8.0

I have to say I'm shocked that that a key part of the Notes replication engine, something that has worked for years, doesn't work anymore. But hey, at least I can look forward to Google Gadgets in 8.5...

Harley Davidson - Outsourcing

Mike Sobczak — Fri, 8 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400

From the unknown comic...

Our Friends in America

Mike Sobczak — Fri, 11 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400

From the unknown comic...

LotuSphere: Day 2 (pt. 2)

Mike Sobczak — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 00:00:00 -0400

AD102 - What's New & Next in Domino Designer

Notes 8 provides a way for you to consume a web service using LotusScript. I believe this was possible in ND7 using Java and Axis, so those who only feel comfortable developing in LotusScript are now all set.

DB2 Integration was mentioned. I'm guessing that this means that this feature is now fully supported by Lotus, unlike before when you had to register yourself with Lotus as a user of this feature in order to get some kind of support.

Most of the new design capabilities discussed require you to designate your database as a composite application. Even if your application isn't part of something else, or includes something else. For example, unless your database is set up as a composite application, you won't be able to design your views so that the documents are tiled. All of the composite application features are driven off of a WSDL file you need to create first. Domino Designer comes with a WSDL editor, so you don't have to create the XML from scratch. The WSDL file then provides the properties you select in the new Composite Settings property that is available in views, actions, etc. I'm sure I can figure all this out when the time comes, but it does sound a bit complicated.

The views in your composite application can then be set up to wrap when the view is narrowed. You can only wrap for up to two rows, which is OK but seems fairly restrictive, considering that views now can display each document entry on up to 9 rows.

Creating a tabbed view with 26 [A] to [Z] buttons (ala the Contacts view) is now a property. Very Nice!

You can now designate which column expands to meet the window width. This replaces the Expand last column to window width property that had been around since R4.

Lastly, Maureen Leland gave us a preview of Domino Designer as an Eclipse plug-in. Personally, I'm completely OK with this. Provided the class browser includes custom LotusScript classes, of course! (Maureen said that they are trying to incorporate that into the product.) By using Eclipse, we'll be able to edit CSS and File Resources directly in Designer. That's great as I always thought the Open With feature was more of a means to an end. I'd also like to be able to edit my applet code in the new version of Designer, instead of just importing applet code.

AD103 - IBM Lotus Component Designer Overview

Once I realized that Component Designer was the new name for Workplace Designer, I skipped out of this presentation.

AD501 - Writing, Debugging and Troubleshooting IBM Lotus Domino Agents with Eclipse

I was already familiar with most of the content via Bob Balaban's articles for the Lotus Advisor. I didn't remember that I could write a class that implements AgentContext though, so that was good to know.

For the last ten minutes, Jonathan Sir Hendrey provided some good information on debugging Java agents running on the server.

INV102 Web 2.0 Trends and Technologies

The room for this session was packed. After all of the talk in the general session about how Lotus will be addressing Web 2.0 stuff in upcoming releases of Notes and new Lotus products, there were probably a lot of people like me who felt they needed to understand what Web 2.0 was all about. Carol Jones and Robert Yates gave a great presentation. There was so much ground covered in this presentation that was new to me that I won't even bother trying to describe it all here. The one thing that kept popping into my head was how much training it would take to explain to users at a large company like mine why you would tag a document, and what a topic cloud is. Some members of management still see IM as a toy, so I can only guess what they'll think of RSS feeds!

AD104 Integrating IBM Lotus Domino into Your Portlets with IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory This was the last presentation I saw today. The portlet factory is the replacement for the IBM Lotus Domino Toolkit for WebSphere Studio. It works in a similar fashion, but you don't have to get into the coding of JSPs like you needed to with the toolkit. One disappointing aspect of the factory is that it doesn't display rich text context. I have a ton of file cabinets developed back in the R4 days that I was hoping I could portlet-ize using the factory. Jonathan Booth said that displaying rich text is at the top of their list of features to add to the factory. I wonder how soon that will come into being?

Last but not least, I got to see the following vendors in the showcase this evening:

LotusUserGroup.org - nice finally meeting you, Debbie Lynd!
Teamstudio - ditto Craig Schumann and Amanda Marguerite!
TLCC - Howard Greenberg's courses are always the best, even the ones I don't review for DominoPower
DLI.tools - I wish I'd heard about DocLogic a few months back, when my company was looking for tools like this
Binary Tree - too bad my friend Perry Hiltz couldn't make it, but Carl Baumann said he can come out to present for the DNP anytime!
MK Network - thanks for the free thumb drive, David!
Sherpa Software - the propeller beanie made my night!
RPR Wyatt - I'd hoped to meet DNP booster Ron Gilbert, but he unfortunately couldn't make it

And last but not least, I got to meet Andy Donaldson, who almost got a chance to move back to Michigan.

Lotusphere2007

Public service announcement--ATM backwards PIN scam

Mike Sobczak — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 17:36:13 -0400

One of the nice benefits of working for a bank is that I get special holidays off, like Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I don't get the day after Thanksgiving off, or Good Friday, but I can live with that. Michigan is experiencing a major ice storm today, so the last thing I wanted to do was to get in my car and drive to work! But that doesn't mean that I need to stop wearing my banker's hat today. Quite the contrary. Since I work for a bank, I thought I could do some good and help warn people about a hoax that does much more harm than good.

Several months ago, I received a chain letter describing how entering your ATM PIN backwards will notify police. The letter went like this:

Were you aware that...

Should you ever be forced to withdraw monies from an ATM machine, you�can notify the police by entering your Pin # in reverse.��The Machine� will still give you the monies you requested, but unknown to the robber, etc, the police will be immediately dispatched to help you.

The�broadcast stated that this method of calling the police is very seldom�used because people don't know it exist, and it might mean the difference between life and death.��Hopefully, none of you will have�to�use this, but I wanted to pass it along just in case you hadn't heard�of it. Please pass it along to everyone possible.

I asked several people in my company's operations area, and they'd never heard of this before. Right then and there, I knew the e-mail was a hoax.

As it so happens, Susan Tompor wrote a column in Sunday's Free Press completely debunking this urban legend. Since the Free Press (and the Detroit News) only let you read articles on their websites for one week after publication, I've included the text of this article in the Read More link below.

Patent owner?!?

Mike Sobczak — Wed, 3 Jan 2007 09:26:45 -0400

Today I received what I thought was a forgettable piece of junk mail. Since I typically shred anything with my name and address on it, I opened the letter and unconsiously began to read it. I was taken completely by surprise when I read the following:

Dear Michael Sobczak,

It is my great pleasure to congratulate you on the granting of your newest patent! On 12/26/2006 you were issued patent number 7,155,435 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

At first I thought this was a bogus offer trying to entice me to work with the company to get my ideas submitted and approved for patents. But, no, the letter spoke the truth. Near the bottom of the letter was a sample patent certificate with a description of the patent:

METHOD FOR RESOLVING ISSUES WITHIN A TEAM ENVIRONMENT

With that in mind, I remembered what the letter was referring to. Way back in 1999, while working for NuTechs, I did some custom Teamroom development for Ford. The purpose of the Teamroom template I worked on was to assist in the acquisition of Volvo by Ford. I worked on this project until January 2000, when the team of NuTechs consultants supporting the Teamrooms was reduced to one, and I was not the lucky one asked to stay behind.

In October 2000 I was asked by several Ford employees I used to work with come back and participate in a patent discussion. The discussion focused on whether any techniques incorporated into the custom Teamroom template were unique and could be submitted for patent protection. I admit, I was completely dubious about the entire idea of patenting anything I did on the project. How could we patent something that was based on a work by Lotus? The person representing the legal department said that anything can be patented, even a concept. This was around the time that Amazon.com was defending its use of the "one-click" shopping concept, and probably also the time that British Telecom was trying to patent the concept of the "hyperlink". With those cases in mind, I gamely went along with the discussion.

As best as I can remember, the idea (or concept) we decided to patent involved the escalation of issues to a management steering committee. The Teamroom template contains an Issue form. The Issue form that I customized for Ford contained a checkbox labeled "Escalate". When this box was checked, the issue would be included when the user opened the "Escalated Issues" report. This report would include escalated issues from any of the twenty custom Teamrooms being used for the Ford-Volvo merger. From my perspective as a developer, the development of this function was fairly straightforward: one checkbox and one LotusScript agent that cycled through all twenty custom Teamrooms and printed out a HTML report. But, and this is the important part, the concept was new, or at least hadn't been patented yet.

Naturally, I forgot all about the patent discussion meeting after it was held six years ago. Until today, that is. Now I'm the proud father of a frivolous patent! I guess I'll be breaking out the champagne at LotuSphere!

Save the Garden City Public Library

Mike Sobczak — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 18:17:40 -0400

For many of you who live in Michigan, the plight of our state has been front-and-center for several years now. The financial problems of some of our biggest employers, including GM, Ford, Delphi, Visteon, Tower Automotive, NWA and others, have already negatively impacted many who used to work for those companies. Those who are fortunate to still be working do so under what can best be described as dire circumstances.

I am one that agrees with those who believe that the demise of the American manufacturing sector is inevitable, with cheap and efficient labor seeming available all over the globe. This fact has been reported for many years now, with recent reporting taking on the tenor of a "dead pool", where most are predicting when American manufacturing as we know it will finally slip into oblivion. Unfortunately, the affect this demise has had on local communities is not well reported or well known, even within Michigan.

An example of how a shrinking base of decent-paying manufacturing jobs has effected a local community is Garden City. A few weeks ago, the city council decided to find a way to eliminate the Garden City Public Library. Garden City is a small Detroit suburb, with less than 40,000 residents. (Livonia, the city where my family lives, typically as 100,000 residents.) Some may know of Garden City as the birthplace of Little Ceaser's Pizza back in 1959. It seems that Garden City has a budget deficit of $1.8 million dollars. While it makes sense that the city would need to find a way to cut expenses, the operating budget of the library is only $250,000. This includes maintenance of the facility, the cost of the materials (books, DVDs, CDs, newspapers, etc.), as well as the staff. To me, $250,000 is a pittance compared to what it costs to operate newer libraries opened in Westland and Southfield, to name a few. I could go so far as to say that the salary of one executive at any large organization would essentially cover what it costs to run the entire library.

To add insult to injury, while the Garden City Public Library would close, the Community Center would relocate to the building the library currently occupies. While the Community Center does provide useful services of its own, most of those services are not free, including subsidized meals for seniors. My wife, who works at the library, went to a city council meeting the other week, and was astonished to find that those on the council think that the only services the library provides is access to a copying machine and books for children under five. So much for internet access, DVDs, CDs, fiction and nonfiction books, newspapers, periodicals, etc. When I heard that, I realized that this is the price citizens pay for not taking any part in their local government. The seniors who live in the city vote, so they get to keep their cheap lunches, while the community at large loses a valuable resource forever. Jokingly, I told my wife that the library should contact Bill Gates and ask him if he'd foot the $250,000 to keep the library open. Heck, the city could even rename the library in his honor. (To be honest, with $50 billion in assets, Bill could probably buy the city outright. Anyone ready for Bill Gates, USA?)

For those of you who may be interested in the plight of a public library in a small community being hit hard by the incredibly shrinking Michigan economy, you should check out this blog by a library supporter. For those of you who live in a community where your library and other public services aren't on the chopping block, keep attuned to your local elected officials. You never know what surprises they may have in store for you tomorrow.

Trivial stuff

Mike Sobczak — Sat, 4 Feb 2006 22:51:36 -0400

I finally created a favicon.ico for this blog: . I'll need Mr. Rob Wunderlich to install it for me, though. I used the online FAVICON.ICO generator and editor Rob talked about at the DominoFest held last August.

I also added some new banner buttons on the right. I asked Duffbert how to do this back on April 1, 2004, and he was kind enough to send me a link to Adam Kalsey's Button Maker Site. Wow. It only took me 22 months to get back to that!

I'm so behind in the times, its almost quaint.

No need for a Notes client for Linux

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 22 Feb 2005 00:00:00 -0400

At my current customer site, they are able to run the Notes client and the Domino Administrator client on SuSe using CodeWeaver's CrossOver Office 4.1. Performance is great. The only thing that doesn't work is the Server Console in the Domino Administrator. So, there's no reason for Notes users to keep asking (demanding?) for IBM Lotus to create a special Notes client for Linux (which we all know will never happen). I wish IBM Lotus would stop portraying iNotes (excuse me, Domino Web Access) and the Domino Administrator for web browsers as the only answers available for Linux users.

The version of CrossOver Office that is being used at my customer's location is the one that came with the SuSe desktop, by the way.

Anyone out there looking for a Notes Developer job in San Francisco?

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

Got this from a technical recruiter from SalesForce.com the other day. Any of you who may be interested, click on the Read More link below...

I'm the technical recruiter at salesforce.com in San Francisco. We have a very interesting Lotus Notes position available. The description is below. I would love to spread the word about this position but I can't find any Lotus Notes listserv's to send it to. Do you have an recommendations for me. I don't want this email or position to look like a spam. It's a legitimate position with a great CRM company!

If you have any recommendation on how to spread the word about this position to the Lotus guru's, I would greatly appreciate it.

New V6 XML classes make verifying an XML file for well-formedness a snap

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 2 Sep 2004 00:00:00 -0400

To ensure that the XML text file I'm creating in my Lotusscript agent is well-formed, I used the new V6 XML classes. The code you see below was taken almost verbatim from the Notes 6 Designer Help. Since I didn't need the output from the SAX parser saved in another text file, I streamed the output to a NotesRichTextItem that I added to a NotesDocument that I don't save.

Sub validateXmlFile ( fileName As String, db As NotesDatabase, s As NotesSession )
	
	Dim doc As NotesDocument
	Dim rti As NotesRichTextItem
	
	'-- Validate the xml file for well-formedness
	Dim xml_in As NotesStream
	Dim saxParser As NotesSAXParser
	
	On Error Goto errorHandler
	
	Set xml_in = s.CreateStream
	If ( xml_in.Open ( fileName ) = False ) Then
		Error 9101, "Could not open " & fileName & " as a NotesStream"
	End If
	If ( xml_in.Bytes = 0 ) Then
		Error 9102, fileName & " is empty"
	End If
	
	Set doc = db.CreateDocument
	Set rti = doc.CreateRichTextItem ( "Body" )
	
	Set saxParser = s.CreateSAXParser ( xml_in, rti )
	
	saxParser.ExitOnFirstFatalError = True
	
	On Event SAX_Error From saxParser Call SAXError
	On Event SAX_FatalError From saxParser Call SAXFatalError
	On Event SAX_Warning From saxParser Call SAXWarning
	
	Call logger.logAction ( "Calling SAX parser", Getthreadinfo ( LSI_THREAD_PROC ) )
	
	saxParser.Process  ' initiate parsing
	
	Call logger.logAction ( "SAX processing complete", Getthreadinfo ( LSI_THREAD_PROC ) )
	
endOfSub:
	Exit Sub
	
errorHandler:
	
	Call logger.logError ( Getthreadinfo ( LSI_THREAD_PROC ), Err, Error$, Erl )
	
	Error Err, Error$  '-- Throw Error back to invoking code
	
	Resume endOfSub
	Return
	
End Sub

Since I'm only worried about whether the XML file is well-formed or not, I only create handlers for the SAX_Error, SAX_FatalError and SAX_Warning events:

Sub SAXError (Source As Notessaxparser, Exception As NotesSaxException )
	
	Dim msg As String
	
	msg = "SAXError encountered at column " & Exception.Column & ", row " & Exception.Row
	
	Call logger.logError ( Getthreadinfo ( LSI_THREAD_PROC ), 9202, msg, 0 )
	Call logger.logError ( Getthreadinfo ( LSI_THREAD_PROC ), 9202, Exception.Message, 0 )
	
	Error 9202, "SAXError"  '-- Throw Error back to invoking code
	
End Sub
Sub SAXFatalError (Source As Notessaxparser, Exception As NotesSaxException)
	
	Dim msg As String
	
	msg = "SAXFatalError encountered at column " & Exception.Column & ", row " & Exception.Row
	
	Call logger.logError ( Getthreadinfo ( LSI_THREAD_PROC ), 9203, msg, 0 )
	Call logger.logError ( Getthreadinfo ( LSI_THREAD_PROC ), 9203, Exception.Message, 0 )
	
	Error 9203, "SAXFatalError"  '-- Throw Error back to invoking code
	
End Sub
Sub SAXWarning (Source As Notessaxparser, Exception As NotesSaxException)
	
	Dim msg As String
	
	msg = "SAXWarning encountered at column " & Exception.Column & ", row " & Exception.Row
	
	Call logger.logError ( Getthreadinfo ( LSI_THREAD_PROC ), 9201, msg, 0 )
	Call logger.logError ( Getthreadinfo ( LSI_THREAD_PROC ), 9201, Exception.Message, 0 )
	
	Error 9201, "SAXWarning"  '-- Throw Error back to invoking code
	
End Sub

As you can see, implementing this type of check is fairly simple. Now, if I could only figure out what version of the SAX standard Notes 6 meets...

Sametime Article #2 finally done!

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 17:15:00 -0400

My wife tends to be as analytical as I am, so I usually ask her to proofread whatever I may be working on at the time. Yesterday, she finished checking over my second Sametime Bot article. I spent some time earlier today entering her suggestions (OK, changes), and I was ready to declare this article as done, until I realized that I hadn't done a spell check on it yet. I tried to spell check it with the code in the article, but the check kept getting hung up on the code segments I included in the text. So, I created a copy of the article and spell checked that. Anything that needed to be changed in the copy, I changed in the actual article as well. Before I sent the article off to Liz at the Lotus Advisor, I wanted to be sure that I'd made all of the corrections to both articles. How did I do this? I used a shareware version of DL SuperC that I had downloaded back in 2003. This is a great tool that I've used this tool to compare the changes I've made to Notes Java agents. (The version of Teamstudio Delta I have is useless for this, as it tries to compare the Java bytecode.) All I needed to do was compare the version of the article with the code segments against the version of the article without the code. All of the places where I'd removed the code appeared as deletes and in blue, so it was easy to skip past those sections:

Now that I'm confident I've made all of the corrections to the actual article, I'm ready to send it off tomorrow.

Agent cleanup

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 14 Jul 2004 17:30:00 -0400

My manager asked me to troubleshoot an agent in our internal RequestTrak database. Employees use RequestTrak to submit vacation and training requests for managerial approval. When a request is submitted, an agent that performs the approval routing is triggered. This agent determines who the requestor's manager is by performing a lookup into our Employee Directory db. It then sends a link to the requestor's manager. For some reason, this agent wasn't working for some of our employees. The employee did have a manager defined in the Employee Directory, so my manager thought there was a problem with the agent's access rights.

The approval routing agent was ... challenging, to put it mildly. The way it was designed made it impossible to determine what was causing the error. So, I performed my usual list of cleanup tasks on the agent so I could figure out where the problem was occurring.

I added Option Declare, which would require that all variables used be declared.
I changed all of the global variables defined in the (Declarations) event to those declared within subroutines. (Global variables bad, local variables good.)
I removed all commented code, as the reason why the code was commented in the first place is never apparent to the person who's supporting the agent (me).
I added error handling to all of the subroutines, so that an error encountered would be sent back to the invoking code, all the way back to the Initialize event.
I added error logging to the Agent Log on the server, so that any errors encountered would be written somewhere other than the Notes Log.

And what did I find? Well, the problem was due to the Employee Directory db not replicating between servers. The employee who reported the problem had a manager defined in one replica, but that change never made it to the replica used by RequestTrak. So, while all of the above cleanup wasn't strictly necessary, it did make it possible for me to easily pinpoint where in the code the error had originated.

For good measure, I modified the agent so that it will mail me an e-mail message whenever an error is encountered. This way, the next time an error occurs, I'll know about it immediately. (The recipient names used for the error notification message are naturally stored in a hidden parameters document, and are not hard-coded within the agent. Don't even get me started about agents that have user names hard-coded within the code...)

DB2 & JDBC

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 13 Jul 2004 17:30:00 -0400

I last tried to access a DB2 db using the Type 4 Universal Driver back on 5/14/04. I decided to give up the ghost on being able to do this, as I needed to get started on the first of two Sametime Bot articles. Since I've almost finished the second one, I decided to take another look at this problem. My new plan of action was to download a full version of DB2 from the IBM Partnerworld Software Download site and install it on one of the servers in the office. When I mentioned this to one of the senior Notes admins at NuTechs, he let me know that he'd already done this as part of a WebSphere Commerce installation. This was good news for me as the idea of spending hours downloading eighteen installation files makes my stomach turn. So, I changed my Java application to point to the DB2 server, and...I still couldn't connect. Here's the Exception I'm getting now:

com.ibm.db2.jcc.c.SqlException: 
IO Exception opening socket to server foo.bar.com on port 446.  
The DB2 Server may be down.
	at com.ibm.db2.jcc.b.a.(a.java:128)
	at com.ibm.db2.jcc.b.b.a(b.java:1212)
	at com.ibm.db2.jcc.c.o.(o.java:495)
	at com.ibm.db2.jcc.b.b.(b.java:274)
	at com.ibm.db2.jcc.DB2Driver.connect(DB2Driver.java:157)
	at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:543)
	at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:194)
	at DB2Test.main(DB2Test.java:28)

I'm wondering if someone needs to open the 446 port on the server running DB2. If not that, what?

Howell has a used record store

Michael Sobczak — Sun, 11 Jul 2004 22:00:00 -0400

I went to Howell today so that I could work on my Sametime Bot article. My plan was to have my Dad watch Steven for the afternoon while I typed away somewhere in semi-seclusion. I figured that after a hard day of writing, I'd be up for a visit to a used record store. Howell actually has one, Discs & Tapes, part of the detroit music retailers collective. However, I didn't finish writing until 4:30 PM and my Dad and I were supposed to meet Deborah at the Stout @ 5:00 PM, so I never got the chance to check out the place. Maybe next time.

Sametime Article 2: finally done commenting the code

Michael Sobczak — Sun, 11 Jul 2004 09:22:34 -0400

One thing I always forget when I commit to writing a programming oriented article is how much time it takes to describe your code. For my second Sametime Bot article, I started out with roughly 700 lines of code to comment. I haven't had this much code to comment since my second article on using JDBC with Domino servlets, which was published in the March 2002 issue of the Lotus Advisor. Now that I'm officially done with my code comments, I'm hoping that I can finish this article by the end of the week.

Returned the Bible today

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 00:00:00 -0400

No, not The Bible, but Tom Pender's UML Bible. While I liked reading his UML Weekend Crash Course, I didn't see the need to keep two books on UML, expecially when I wouldn't be creating any UML diagrams in the immediate future. Sorry, Tom!

Sametime Bot article 2 - still going strong

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 10 Jul 2004 17:00:00 -0400

I spent time this morning editing my article. Then, before dinner, I captured the bot in action in both screenshots and text files containing transcripts of the bot interaction. I wound up with seven screenshots, which is a fairly large amount of screenshots for a code-driven article. I figure I'll end up using the transcripts instead, as they'll take up less space. I don't think the Advisor would publish a twenty page article, even one by me, so I'm trying to conserve on space wherever I can.

How to print entries in a Notes calendar view that do not have a time associated with them

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 9 Jul 2004 16:30:00 -0400

When a calendar view is opened in a browser, Domino presents an HTML representation of that view. So, I told my customer that he could print out the view by opening it using a URL. I want to call this a hack, but since I didn't do any actual programming, I don't know if that label is appropriate. I wouldn't consider this solution as elegant, as my customer still can't print out the calendar from the Notes client. I guess "work-around" will suffice.

Used first GoTo

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 9 Jul 2004 11:00:00 -0400

I sheepishly admit that I used my first GoTo today outside of the context of error handling/trapping. What I really wanted was the Lotusscript equivalent of Java's continue statement. There isn't one, so I had to resort to using the good-old GoTo. The situation that brought this about was that I wanted to skip past a large segment of code within a For loop and continue with the next iteration of the main for loop, like so:

For i = 1 to x
  ...
  ' lots of code here that shouldn't be run sometimes
  ...
...
Next i

To achieve the logic I was looking for, I modified the code like this:

For i = 1 to x
  ...
  If ( condition ) Then
    Goto EndOfMainFor
  End If
  ...
  ' lots of code here
  ...
EndOfMainFor:
Next i

It would have made more sense for me to put all of the code I wanted to run conditionally into its own subroutine, but I didn't have the time to slog through the code and figure out what variables would need to be moved from the current subroutine into the new subroutine. Since this is the first programmatic GoTo I've used since college, I feel like I can live with the consequences.

Notes calendar view printing fun

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 8 Jul 2004 13:30:00 -0400

I modified the design of a calendar view in a custom Notes application so that all documents would have a hard-coded start time of 08:00 AM. This hack did cause the entries appearing in the view to appear on the printout, but all of the entries end up being scrunched into the 08:00 AM timeslot. So, not an improvement.

Printing Notes calendars: why must it always be a pain?

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 8 Jul 2004 13:00:00 -0400

I spent some time yesterday modifying a calendar view in a custom Notes application. The calendar looked fine in the Notes client. However, when my customer printed the calendar view, no entries appeared in the days specified in the print date range. I looked at the calendar view again in the Notes client, and sure enough, there were entries in those days. After searching through the Notes/ Domino 4 & 5 Forum on LDD, I found out that the only way to print calendar entries that did not have an associated time was to use the Calendar List print option:

which produces a listing like this:

July 12, 2004
[document subject]
[document subject]
July 13, 2004
[document subject]
July 13, 2004
[document subject]
[document subject]
[document subject]

which, as you can tell doesn't resemble a calendar by any stretch of the imagination. So, I'm brainstorming another way that my customer can print out the calendar including the entries that appear in the Notes client.

Another handy Notes calendar view tip

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 7 Jul 2004 10:30:00 -0400

I got this from the Span a Document over multiple days in calendar view discussion thread in the Notes/Domino 4 and 5 Forum on LDD. To display a document across multiple days, using a start date and an end date fields in each document as the date range, use the following formula:

Range := @TextToTime ( @Text ( ShowStartDate ) + "-" + @Text ( ShowEndDate ) );
DateList := @Explode(Range);
@TextToTime(Datelist)

Notes calendar view snafu

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 7 Jul 2004 10:00:00 -0400

I don't create calendar views too often, so I tend to forget the nuances that go along with creating them. A customer of mine asked me to modify a calendar view. Unfortunately, whenever I tried to save my changes, Notes cancelled my change and kept dislaying the "Calendar Style views require two columns" messagebox:

After searching through the Notes 4 & 5 forum on LDD, I hit on what was causing the problem. The first column needs to display both the date and the time:

If the first column is set to show the "Date only", the above messagebox rears its ugly head. Based on what I read in LDD, it seems like earlier versions of R5 (and possibly R4?) allowed the "Date only" option. Someone must have "fixed" this in a later release of R5.

Test Cases complete

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 14:30:00 -0400

I finally finished my User Acceptance Test Cases document this afternoon. In all, I documented 43 test cases, 39 functional and four non-functional. The resulting document is 75 pages long. Hopefully, the developer who'll be performing the actual user acceptance testing won't be overwhelmed when he/she sees this document! I have to say that spending two weeks working on test cases and project requirements was refreshing. The Notes/Domino projects I typically work on usually have minimal requirements documented and no testing defined all too often. I view these situations as a result of Notes being more of a Rapid Application Development platform as compared to Java or J2EE. Bogging down a quick Notes development effort with a lot of documentation is the last thing most customers want to do. I wonder, though, when the time comes for those customers to request projects that are more Java/J2EE based, will they be prepared for the level of documentation required for these projects to succeed?

Second Sametime Bot article officially underway

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 23 Jun 2004 20:30:00 -0400

I finally started writing my second article on Sametime Bots for the Lotus Advisor. It seems like forever since I turned in part one on 5/19/04. (The past five weeks certainly passed by in a flash!) Of course, figuring out the nuances of accessing DB2 via JDBC didn't help matters much.

I did remember one facet of WebSphere studio that will end up saving me a considerable amount of time, though. One of the editorial guidelines supplied by the Advisor is that every line of sample code you provide must not exceed 53 characters in length. Also, indentation levels must be two characters each. Previously, I had used a shareware tool (can't remember the name off the top of my head) to view my code and determine the length of each line. However, after spending several months last summer studying for the IBM Test 285, Developing with WebSphere Studio, V5.0, I'd learned that WebSphere Studio includes functionality that makes it easy to format Java code. WebSphere Studio gives you the ability to configure several preferences for formatting Java code. You can tell it to ensure that all lines don't exceed a certain character length, and that tabs are represented by a specific number of spaces. Then, all you need to do is right-click on your code and select the Format option. Very simple, no? This feature will save me many hours I would have spent formatting my code by hand. Now if only I could use this feature with Lotusscript code. Ah, that will be part of Lotus Workplace 3.0, no doubt...

Siemens DirX Manager

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 17:00:00 -0400

I learned about another new product today. Siemens has a product called DirXmetahub that you can use to synchronize data between LDAP directories. The gentleman who showed me how it works wasn't sure if Tivoli has a competing product or not. There is a competing product that is part of the SunONE suite, though. DirXmetahub runs on its own server and can work with any LDAP, X.509 compliant directory. The DirXmetahub executes workflows you develop using the DirX Manager client. These workflows can run either on a scheduled basis, or as persistent processes (24-7-365).

From my experience, this product was reminiscent of LEI, Replic-Action and Data Junction (or djCosmos, as it is now known). Instead of having a VB derivative scripting environment, you write your custom code in TCL. I hadn't heard of TCL since '96. There were two consultants called John and Tom (J&T) who put out a product for use with Notes. They also created some custom install routines for Superior Consultant back when I was there from 1998-99. I wonder what ever happened to those J&T guys?

Anyway, if you're curious about the Siemens DirX products:

DirX Home Page
DirX Solutions Products

Harry Potter

Michael Sobczak — Sun, 20 Jun 2004 21:32:04 -0400

My wife and I saw the latest Harry Potter movie this evening at the eMagine Theatre in Novi. We really liked the movie. My wife thought it was the best of the three. I really enjoyed it too. The only problem I had with the movie was the same problem reported by several critics. Late in the movie, several of the characters explain the plot in what seems like a minute or two. I believe that the producers felt compelled to make this movie shorter than the previous two, so instead of spending an additional ten minutes of screen time to lucidly explain the plot, they just rammed through this part of the movie to keep the action moving along. I have to admit that I thought that the previous two Potter films were a bit long, but in this instance, I would rather had the filmmakers take the time they needed to tell the story properly, instead of trying to keep the running time down to a hair over two hours. This is a minor problem, though, as I'm sure I'll see this movie again and will be able to follow along without a problem.

DB2 scrolling problem solved!

Michael Sobczak — Sun, 20 Jun 2004 11:30:00 -0400

I used Google to try to figure out why I was getting a "CLI0627E The result set is not scrollable." Exception. The first clue I got was from a discussion forum on Solarmetric. The poster stated that he experienced this error when he tried to scroll through a result set that included a CLOB column. So, I changed my SQL statement so that it retrieved specific columns from the table, and everything worked! I still believe that this problem was created when I included this statement:

stmt.setMaxRows ( maxRecs );

When I don't set the max rows for the Statement object, I can scroll through a result set containing a CLOB column without a problem. I'm very relieved that I've solved this problem, as I couldn't move forward on my second Sametime Bot article with the example code not working. Now that it is, I can focus on cleaning up the code and actually starting the article itself.

Keyword selection dialog via the web

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 17 Jun 2004 16:30:00 -0400

I spent time today modifying an application I'm currently developing so that web users would be able to select a company from a list of companies in a separate database. My customer initially asked me if the "Use View dialog for choices" option for a Dialog List worked via the web, and I had to tell him that it didn't. Instead, I would need to create a custom way for web users to select a keyword value.

Since each company has an associated name and an ID, I didn't believe that a combo box would be sufficient. True, I could have designed the combo box so that it displayed the companies with their associated id value, and added some additional fields that would extract the company name and company id from the selected keyword, but I've always felt like that approach is poor design. Considering how Notes users can interact with a PickList, displayed using either @PickList or notesUIWorkspace.PickListCollection, the multi-faceted combo-box approach looks pretty weak by comparison. So, I went about web-enabling the keyword list database.

The lookup database The first thing I did was add a $$ViewTemplate form that would be used to display the view of keywords to web users.

Next, I added the following code to the $$ViewTemplate's JS Header:

var launcher;
var field1;
var field2;
function setFields ( value1, value2 )
{
	launcher.elements[field1].value = value1;
	launcher.elements[field2].value = value2;
	self.close ();
}

The setFields() function sets two fields on the form that launched the current window, then closes itself.

I then added the following code to the $$ViewTemplate's onLoad event:

launcher = window.opener.document.forms[0];
field1 = getCookie ( 'field1' );
field2 = getCookie ( 'field2' );

The above code retrieves the names of the two fields that will be set when setFields() is invoked. I could have hard-coded the field names, but this approach is more flexible.

The lookup view I then modified the lookup view itself, adding a new column with this as its value:

"{select}"

So, when a user clicks on any of the links displayed in this column, the setFields() function in the $$ViewTemplate will be invoked.

The launching form

I modified the form where the user needed to select the keywords to contain this code in the JS Header:

function selectCompany ( field1, field2 )
{
	setCookie ( 'field1', field1 );
	setCookie ( 'field2', field2 );
	var newWindow = window.open ( '/lookup.nsf/webcompanies?OpenView','company_selection',
	'toolbar=no,location=no,scrollbars=yes,status=yes,directories=no,height=450,width=550' )
}

This function uses a Javascript function I found years ago on Builder.com to set a cookie value. (I include this subroutine via a JavaScript Script Library.) I invoke it twice set two cookies to the names of the fields that will be used by the setFields() function in the $$ViewTemplate. The function then opens the lookup view in the other database in a new window, just like a PickList.

The button used to open the web-based PickList contains the following JavaScript code:

selectCompany ( "Company", "CompanyCode" );

So, when the user clicks on the button to select a company, the button invokes the selectCompany() function in the JS Header. This function sets the cookie values and opens the view in a new window. And that's it. Simple, huh?

Writing Test Cases

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 17:00:00 -0400

I started a new assignment today. This assignment is essentially a "fill-in" assignment for two weeks, after which I will be starting another assignment that will be much longer in duration. For the next two weeks, I will be helping to complete some project documentation. My primary focus will be completing a document of test cases. From what I've been told, the developers on this project will not be able to test their solution unless they can present their test cases to the development lab. Since I've been working in IT for thirteen years, I'm already experienced with all phases of project development. So, writing test cases is something experienced with. The project development life-cycle this customer uses is very comprehensive, at least when compared to SLC and PMI. Its foundation is in CMM, so that could explain the volume of paperwork involved. Not that paperwork bothers me in any way; I'd rather have too much than too little. It took me a little while to determine where test cases fit into the overall development roadmap. After that, I just needed to take the information provided to me over the course of the day and begin developing the test cases. I believe that this document is due sometime next week, so as I learn more about the overall project, the easier it will be to develop the test cases.

First day at the Renaissance Center

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 15 Jun 2004 10:00:00 -0400

Today was the first day I drove to the RenCen for work. I took the Lodge all of the way down, and encountered no problems along the way. Well, there were a few drivers that like the idea of cutting people off, but you can find those kinds of idiots on any expressway. As for the RenCen itself, I was pleasantly surprised. I was down there about three years ago for an interview, and it didn't look like it did today. The environment looked brighter and more inviting that it did before. I account that to the remodeling that has probably been done over the intervening years. I came away with the impression that there is more activity in the building, more people hustling and bustling about. There must be more people working in the RenCen now than three years ago. Anyway, I enjoyed my day today. Even the ride back home went well. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the next time I'll need to trek down here again will go as well.

Notes/Domino activity logging

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 18:30:00 -0400

A project I'm working on is an application that will be accessed by both Notes clients and browsers. My customer has asked me to provide statistics on how much activity the application experiences after it has been moved into production. The idea here is that if the application is accessed frequently, the application can be viewed as a success.

Products like WebTrends can be used to report on web user activity of a Domino application, but I've never found their reporting for Domino applications very usable. For example, it will tell you what views are being accessed, but may return statistics using the view's UNID instead of its user name. Also, since this application will be used by both browser and Notes client users, WebTrends would only provide data for half of the picture. The only product I know of that tracks activity of Notes applications is the Notes Log.

In terms of custom Notes/Domino activity logging techniques, a customer I worked for about two years ago had implemented a technique in all of their Domino applications that would track each time the application is accessed, but this didn't go down to the view or document level. I remember reading an article where the author described adding code to each view's Postopen event to keep track of what views were being used, but I couldn't remember who wrote the article or when. I searched all previous Lotus Advisor articles for anything on this topic, but I didn't see anything relevent. Based on these findings, I realized that I would need to create something from scratch. The technique I will be developing will need to be somewhat generic, as my customer will probably want the same solution implemented in other Notes/Domino applications as well. I'll provide more details as I hash this out.

New "simpler" database and SQL statement not working

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 9 Jun 2004 20:15:00 -0400

In an effort to reduce the amount of code I would need to include in my second article on Sametime bots, I decided that the bot will query a denormalized table, instead of pulling information from several tables. (Referencing one table would yield a shorter SQL statement.) For some reason, this Exception is being thrown:

CLI0627E  The result set is not scrollable.

The stack trace points to the following statement:

rs.last();

I'm not sure what is causing this problem. I checked the table's properties, to see if I'd inadvertantly turned off scrolling at the table or database level. I didn't see anything, so I'll need to keep looking.

Web enabling one Notes db easier than exporting data to the other db

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 9 Jun 2004 13:00:00 -0400

I had a meeting today with one of my customers where we discussed migrating the data from a Notes database I support into another Notes database that was web-enabled. The Notes database has data that the users of the web db would like to be access via the corporate intranet. Working under the assumption that the users who currently access the web-enabled database would prefer to access the data in the Notes db in the web db, I proposed creating an agent that would periodically copy all new and modified documents from the Notes db over to the web db. I would also need to research the web db and ensure that the imported documents wouldn't affect any existing functionality in the web db. However, the documents in the Notes db don't have the same structure as the documents in the web-enabled db. This meant that in order for the documents in the Notes db to appear correctly in the existing views of the web db, users would need to select additional fields to ensure that the document would appear in the correct categories in the web db.

While reflecting on this problem, I proposed just web-enabling the Notes db. Users would need to look in two separate dbs for the information they needed, but the solution would ensure that neither database would be impacted in the effort to integrate them. My customer agreed to this strategy, which was fortunate as it seemed like integrating the two Notes dbs wasn't going to be easy.

Notes table madness

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 7 Jun 2004 16:00:00 -0400

I spent several hours today redoing a table with 70+ rows in it, as the table was stretching way beyond the right-hand margin. I couldn't see any specific problem with the contents of the table itself, as it contained just standard form design elements (static text, text fields, rich-text fields, etc.) To identify what was causing the problem, I pasted a row from the existing table into a new table, one row at a time. I eventually discovered what was causing the problem. One paragraph had a paragraph setting (the alignment?) or a special character that was causing that column to retain its width, no matter how I adjusted the table properties. Once I got rid of that setting, the table was fine.

JDBC Potpourri

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 2 Jun 2004 15:45:00 -0400

Here are some links to a few JDBC-related items I needed to research today while developing my DB2 Bot:

Can't use JDBC-ODBC bridge driver from within a Java thread

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 1 Jun 2004 17:30:00 -0400

I did a Google search on "JDBC Java threads", and found this excerpt in the Java FAQ:

14. Is the JDBC-ODBC Bridge multi-threaded?
No. The JDBC-ODBC Bridge does not support concurrent access from different threads. The JDBC-ODBC Bridge uses synchronized methods to serialize all of the calls that it makes to ODBC. Multi-threaded Java programs may use the Bridge, but they won't get the advantages of multi-threading. In addition, deadlocks can occur between locks held in the database and the semaphore used by the Bridge. We are thinking about removing the synchronized methods in the future. They were added originally to make things simple for folks writing Java programs that use a single-threaded ODBC driver.

So, I guess this would explain the behavior I'm experiencing. On a hunch, I changed my Bot code so that it would make a connection to a local DB2 database on my laptop. This, of course, worked. The DB2 JDBC driver must be multi-threaded, whereas the JDBC-ODBC bridge driver is not. While I'm happy that I can continue on with my Bot coding, the Lotus Advisor tech editor who approved my idea had asked that my example access an ODBC datasource. I'll need to broach this subject with Liz soon.

ODBC Bot officially underway

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 31 May 2004 13:00:00 -0400

I began creating an ODBC Bot today. This Bot will serve as the example for my second article on Sametime Bots for the Lotus Advisor. As I do with most of my development work, I looked to the Bots I'd previously developed for code to steal from. I ended up using the "skeleton" of the Directory Bot, a Bot that retrieves information from the Domino Directory. Everything seemed to be going fine until I tried to access an ODBC datasource within the code. For some reason, the code would attempt to connect and just hang. No exceptions thrown, no nothing.

E-mailed Sametime Bot intro article

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 29 May 2004 08:40:00 -0400

I sent the final draft of my introduction to Sametime Bots article to Liz Olsen, editor of the Lotus Advisor, this morning. I was supposed to send it to her yesterday (Friday), but work turned out to much busier than I expected. I could have sent my article on Tuesday, but I'm on vacation all next week and don't want to forget to do this while I'm busy relaxing. This way, I know Liz will get my article first thing next week.

An easy way to delete all records in a table using LSX

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 26 May 2004 09:00:00 -0400

Received this handy tip from Andre Guirard, in response to a posting of mine in the Lotus Enterprise Integration forum. To quickly delete all records currently in a table, use the LCConnection.Action method:

Call con.Action ( LCACTION_TRUNCATE )

Sametime presentation deja vu

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 25 May 2004 20:30:00 -0400

I gave my Sametime Bot introduction presentation to some of my fellow NuTechnicians tonight. This was the first time I'd given a presentation after working a full day beforehand. I can conclusively say that its easier (for me, anyway) to give a presentation first thing in the morning rather than at 6:30 PM at night.

My presentation went well. And it was nice to see some people I hadn't seen in a while, like Coretta, Stavros and John. I liked Jordan's presentation on using Cadenza's mForms to create a PDA interface to a Notes application. Also, Sam gave a nice presentation on how NuTechs' customer-facing website was revamped from 100% Domino to a WebSphere Java application that referenced Domino content.

Now I know why the web interface to QSI was removed

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 25 May 2004 17:45:00 -0400

I walked in on a conference call between a fellow NuTechs consultant, a Trilog consultant, and the CEO of Trilog. They were discussing a customer who already uses QSI for Notes. A Flowbuilder version of QSI has been developed, or at least some of the modules are available. I can see why a vendor wouldn't want to support essentially two web UIs for the same product. But by removing functionality that was already there, it forces their customers hands. Stick with a Notes-only version? Move to the Flowbuilder version? The customer I visited last Friday has opted to stick with Notes, but web-enable one of the databases.

The block heard 'round the world...

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 24 May 2004 23:00:00 -0400

Tayshaun Prince blocks a layup attempt by Reggie Miller with 17 seconds left. The shot would have tied the score at 69.

Finishing touches on Sametime Bot introductory article

Michael Sobczak — Sun, 23 May 2004 13:30:00 -0400

All I did today was write the Conclusion, so no big shakes here. Concluding paragraphs/sections are always tough, as you don't want it to just be a summary of what the reader has just read. However, you need to touch on the major points addressed in what has come before. I also put in a "teaser" sentence about my next article about Sametime Bots, which will show how to actually build one.

Perhaps the only thing harder than the Conclusion is the SubTitle and Abstract. But since I don't want to bore you with any more gorey details, I'll just stop here.

Successfull used record store trip during lunch

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 21 May 2004 11:45:00 -0400

While returning from a client site, I noticed this used record store on 14 Mile road between Inkster and Stephenson Highway:

Flip Side
41 E. 14 Mile Road
Clawson, MI 48017

The place looked like someone's basement, with LPs and cassettes collected in indescriminate piles here and there. FYE this is not! Anyway, they did have used CDs for several acts I've been on the lookout for. I was able to find the following:

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - Dirty Little Secrets (1999)
FatBoySlim - Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars (2000)
New Order - Get Ready (2001)
Xymox - Headclouds (1993)

Xymox was a stretch for me, as it had been recommended by my former hairstylist at London Calling a year ago. (She actually recommended Clan of Xymox, but I'll leave that for a future blog.) I haven't had a chance to listen to these just yet, but I shall and will provide some informal reviews later.

QSI-induced opportunity for development

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 21 May 2004 11:30:00 -0400

I just got done examining an Lotus Notes database that a customer would like to have web-enabled. This database is just one of many that make up the Quality/QS9000 application known as QSI. It seems that prior to the current release, the database had been web-enabled. I find it strange that a vendor would take away functionality like that.

And I thought my day today was challenging

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 19 May 2004 17:30:00 -0400

Got to my primary customer site today at 8:00 AM. Next, I drove to another customer location for a meeting from 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM. After the meeting, I returned to my original customer site and worked 'till 6:00 PM. I didn't get back home until 7:00 PM. I know, some of you out there are saying: Mike, you are such a lightweight. After seeing the pictures (879,104 bytes) my friend Don Gates sent me from Iraq, I'd have to agree with you.

For those of you who may not know Don, he works for IBM as an IBM Content Management Software IT Specialist. I've known Don since '96, when we both worked for Perot Systems. These pics are clean by the way--no images that anyone could find disturbing. Well, maybe the camel spiders. For me, anyway, its been easy to forget just how much of a cultural difference there is between the US and Iraq.

Mail template development

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 18 May 2004 11:00:00 -0400

One of my customers was taking the first steps towards migrating to Notes 6.5.1, and they needed moving mail template customizations from their R5 mail template to a new 6.5.1 mail template. While testing out the new template, my customer and I noticed that folders created by users aren't refreshed when the mail file's design is refreshed. I offered to write an agent that would automate this process for him. Thankfully, I'd learned about the undocumented @UpdateViewDesign function back on 4/14/2004.

Another 1200 words bite the dust

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 15 May 2004 16:00:00 -0400

I dropped off my son at my Dad's house for the afternoon, and headed over to the Brighton District Library to work on my article. I'm amazed at how people use the resources available in libraries, particularly one like the Brighton District Library. This is a beautiful library, with at least twelve PCs dedicated to internet use. You'd think that this environment would inspire the people who come here to accomplish something important while they're here. In several instances, that was definitely not the case. A kid was supposed to be doing his homework, but instead goofed off with a friend until the friend had to leave and the kid's mom showed up. The kid had to tell his mom that he had only gotten as far as question three on his list of twenty. While writing my article, I used one of the PCs to look up some Sametime Bot info on the web, and found that the PC's previous user was in several chat rooms. After packing up my laptop, I looked around the library for a while. Some people were using the PCs that should be using to look up resources to gamble on the internet. I wonder how these people would feel if their library had the budget of a smaller library in a community that doesn't have cash to burn. How would they feel if there were only four computers connected to the internet? Or that no new books had been purchased in months? This library has so much money that they can afford to buy teenagers copies of Fangoria magazine. Amazing.

(Possible) solution to the CLI0621E error

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 14 May 2004 14:30:00 -0400

I've noticed that quite a few folks have found this blog due to my postings on CLI0621E. Today, I learned of a workaround. Instead of using the Type 3 driver, a co-worker of mine recommended using the Type 4 driver instead. IBM refers to this driver as the "db2 universal driver". For more info on it, check out this page.

Unfortunately, the DB2 server I've been trying to use was installed as part of a Lotus Workplace installation. Because a Lotus Workplace doesn't include the ability to run custom Java web apps, when I try to access the DB2 server using the aforementioned driver, I get this error:

com.ibm.db2.jcc.c.SQLException: Expired JDBC driver.  
IBM DB2 JDBC Universal Driver Architecture 1.2.34 Test Build expired on Sun Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2003
	at com.ibm.db2.jcc.c.k.a(k.java:57)
	at com.ibm.db2.jcc.c.l.(l.java:274)
	at com.ibm.db2.jcc.a.b.(b.java:204)
	at com.ibm.db2.jcc.DB2Driver.connect(DB2Driver.java:255)
	at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:543)
	at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:194)
	at DB2Test.main(DB2Test.java:24)

We do have a WebSphere Application Server sandbox set up here at NuTechs. I'll try that at the next opportunity that presents itself.

FTP directory was 100% utilized

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 13 May 2004 11:00:00 -0400

My customer let me know that the directory I was FTP'ing the test files to was 100% utilized, which was why the file I was sending over kept arriving as 0 bytes.

FTP problem turns out to not be my problem

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 12 May 2004 15:30:00 -0400

My customer let me know that my Java agent that FTPs a text file from the Notes server to another server for further processing is sending over a file that is 0 bytes in size. Since the code behind the Java agent hasn't changed since the last successful test on 4/7, I initially thought the problem was due to my inadvertently changing the code sometime afterwards. After reviewing and testing and tweaking the code for over an hour, I couldn't find anything wrong.

Since the code looked fine, I thought that maybe there was something wrong with the file that was being FTP'd. The file contains an XML document, so maybe something about the XML was causing the problem. (A rouge XML element or node, perhaps?) The file I was sending over contained five individual entries, each representing one Notes document. I tested the code five times, each time sending over a file with only one entry in it. Each time, the file found its way to the destination server with all of its bytes intact. I noticed that each file being sent was less than 3k. This lead me to believe that it was the size of the file I was FTP'ing that was causing the problem. This seemed ludicrous, as the file I was sending was only 5,594 bytes. But since stranger things have happened on this project, I wasn't ready to rule out this hypothesis just yet.

I tested my code so that it each time it FTP'd a file, it would send over a progressively larger file. The first file I FTP'd was 2,249 bytes, and that arrived intact. The second file I sent with 3,456 bytes arrived as a zero-byte file. So, the size of the file was definitely causing a problem. I notified my customer about these results and he said that there weren't any restrictions on the size of the file as far as he knew, but he'd check on it to be sure.

On a hunch, I changed my Java code so that it would FTP the file to an alternative dev server instead. This time, the 5k file arrived fully intact. I let my customer know that the problem has to be with the initial dev server I'm FTP'ing the file to. He said that for now, I can FTP the file to the alternative server until we figure out what is causing the problem. I postulated that the problem may be with the permission's allowed to the userid I'm using to FTP the file, but since I'm not that savvy with Unix security, I wouldn't know where to look.

Sametime article coming along famously

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 11 May 2004 20:00:00 -0400

Since I wanted to work on my article after work today, I started work at 8:30 AM left at 4:30 PM. Due to the incredibly horrible traffic in Metro Detroit these days (created solely by road construction), it still took me at least 45 minutes to get home. I still managed to add another 500 words to my work in progress.

Sametime Bot article underway

Michael Sobczak — Sun, 9 May 2004 13:00:00 -0400

I started my Sametime Bot introductory article this fine Sunday morning. I had to bow out of church with my in-laws and brunch afterwards, but I needed to get this article started without letting another weekend went by. My writing went very well, as I managed to punch out 750 words. I'm using the Powerpoint presentation I gave Tuesday as an outline, which definitely helps.

Van Helsing: all sound and fury, signifying nothing

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 8 May 2004 21:00:00 -0400

My Dad, my wife and I went to see Van Helsing this evening after dinner. The movie was OK, but I guess I was expecting more. The previous Dracula movies I'd seen recently, Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Dracula (1979) and Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), all paid attention to the underlying myths and legends that make Dracula such a compelling character. In this movie, the approach is "Look, vampires! Shoot them!" The other disappointment for me was that Hugh Jackman isn't given anything to do other than shoot weapons that could not have existed in the timeframe of the movie. He is essentially a video game action figure here, a surprising development considering that he did fine work bringing the comic book character of Wolverine to life. Here, with considerable literary and cinematic background material to work with, he essentially does nothing.

The mad dash to next Tuesday begins

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 6 May 2004 17:00:00 -0400

One of my customers approved a estimate for a seven-day project this afternoon. The project covers enhancements to an application that (for all intents and purposes) was delivered in January. While getting a project approved (no matter how small) is great news, the work must be completed by next Tuesday @ 1:00 PM, when a pilot training session on the application will be held. So, that means that 56 hours of work will need to be completed in two business days. I wonder if NuTechs has anybody around that would be willing to chip in? ; + )

The Big Day: Sametime Bot presentation delivered

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 4 May 2004 12:00:00 -0400

I thought that my Sametime Bot presentation went very well today. Since I wasn't "on" until 10:20 AM, I managed to work on one of my projects for an hour or so beforehand. I thought my delivery was a bit rushed, but I remembered everything I was supposed to say and covered all of the points I wanted to cover. To make my demo a bit more interesting, at one point I used Notes Buddy to interact with the Bot I'd developed to interact with NuTechs' CRM application, iExtensions. I thought Notes Buddy would get people's attention because it uses IBM ViaVoice to read back responses returned by the Bot. I mentioned that I think Notes Buddy is cool because your computer will sound like Stephen Hawking, and that got a few chuckles from the crowd.

After the seminar was over, I had a chance to talk to two gentlemen I know from Brass Craft. Pat, their Notes and AS/400 admin, and I have kept in regular contact since my project ended back in May 2001. He regularly attends the DNP DominoFests, and also sends me the occasional e-mail question. I hadn't seen Mark, the CIO, since the project I worked on ended. He asked how Stacey, the NuTechs Project Manager I worked with on the project, was doing. I said that as far as I knew, she was doing great. She's still in England, and last I heard she's reporting to someone further up the food chain. She told me that the company she works for was going to go in the .NET direction instead of Java, a decision that I believe may end up being more frequent than IBM would ever admit. He asked me to tell Stacey "hello" the next time I talk to her, and I need to pass this along to her before I forget.

I got the chance to talk to another one of NuTechs customers, Cheryl of the Michigan Library Consortium. I let her know that Deborah, my wife, works at the Garden City Public Library, and I'm sure is familiar with some of the systems that Cheryl uses. Cheryl said that since MLC uses iExtensions, she would be interested in having my iExtensions Bot. But first, MLC needs to get migrated to 6.5.1 and then implement a Sametime server.

When I returned to NuTechs, I was sure to ask everyone involved with the seminar how I did. Rob thought I did a good job. The only suggestion I had for me was to do a quick demo early on, so that attendees can see something without having to wait twenty minutes into the presentation. This was a great suggestion, one I'll definitely remember when I do this presentation again. I'm already thinking of giving an expanded version to the DNP at a later date, and who knows, I may decide to take it on the road at some point. Brian also said I did a good job, and thanked me several times for presenting. I made sure to thank Walt for giving me the opportunity to present, as I know its not typical to have a full-time consultant like myself take time out of my busy schedule to present. Walt said it was good practice for me, and I agreed. Hopefully, I'll get the chance to present at a NuTechs seminar again in the future.

Last run-through of Sametime Bot prez

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 3 May 2004 19:45:00 -0400

I went through my Sametime Bot presentation one more time this evening before I left to pick up Steven from Grandma's house. Sure, its a little strange standing up and giving a presentation in front of an empty room, but at least it gives me a chance to practice my pacing and my asides. I could have waited for my wife to come home from work, but she usually doesn't arrive until 9:10 PM, and she's usually ready to relax after an evening of dealing with cranky patrons.

I made a few minor changes to my Powerpoint slides, and I think I'm as ready as I'll ever be for tomorrow's seminar on Extreme Messaging.

Potentially exciting new project

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 3 May 2004 15:00:00 -0400

I came up with a rough estimate for a project that would involve enhancing an existing Notes application so that users would be able to produce a fairly sophisticated from the web. The report would need to be produced dynamically, either as HTML or as a PDF file. I'm fairly confident I can create the HTML version of the report using xml and xslt, but the PDF version would be a new one to me. I'd heard about using xslt or xslfo to create PDF documents before, but hadn't actually done this myself. My good friend Frank Neugebauer actually wrote an article on using xslfo to create a PDF document a while back for XML Journal. Since he also was the tech editor for the XSL Formatting Objects Developer's Handbook, I imagine I'll be sending Frank a few e-mails if this project is approved.

I now have two Sametime Bot articles to write

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 3 May 2004 13:00:00 -0400

Since the Lotus Advisor hadn't covered Sametime Bots before, I thought that writing an article that described how to create one wouldn't be as useful without an introduction to the concept of Sametime Bots. So, I asked Liz if I could turn my Sametime Bot article into a two-parter. The first article would be an introduction, and the second one would describe how to create a Sametime Bot. This structure would be similar to the articles I wrote back in 2002 that explained how to use JDBC in Domino applications. I e-mailed Liz last Friday with this suggestion. Her response? "Yes, that's perfect. Please run with that plan." So now I have two articles to write. Its nice to be in demand.

Dad comes through again

Michael Sobczak — Sun, 2 May 2004 18:00:00 -0400

I don't know what I'd do without my Dad. Since I'm not even slightly mechanically inclined, I asked my Dad to stop by today after work so that he could take a look at a leaky faucet outside the house and hang a few wall fixtures for Deborah. It turned out that the faucet only needed a new washer, and we were able to buy a package of about ten for $1.40 at Lowe's. (Somewhere, a worker in China is shaking his head in the knowledge of a job well done...) My Dad hung a coat rack and the hooks for a cloth headboard for the twin bed in Steven's room. (I'd never heard of a cloth headboard before. It must be something my wife heard about on the Home and Garden Channel.) After my Dad finished all of these little fix-it projects for us, I took him to Famous Dave's for dinner. We got there just after 4:00 PM and there already a thirty-minute wait. Must have been due to the church crowd. We finally got a table just before 5:00 PM. My Dad liked the food, which I think beats Red Hot & Blue hands down.

P. F. Chang's: nice place

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 1 May 2004 20:45:00 -0400

My wife and I ate dinner at P. F. Chang's tonight. I have to say, it is a very nice place. It sure has more atmosphere than your local Mom and Pop Chinese restaurant. We had the Peking Dumplings for an appetizer, and they were probably the best we'd ever had. For an entree, my wife had the Sweet and Sour Chicken, which she loved. I decided to be adventurous and ordered the Beef A La Sichuan, which was different. It kinda reminded me of tandoori chicken in a way. It was OK, but I don't think I'd order it again. Next time, I'll play it safe and get the Mongolian Beef, which my wife brought home for me once before and I really enjoyed.

Tiger game

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 22:30:00 -0400

We all arrived just before the opening pitch. The weather was a bit nippy, but overall it was good weather to watch a game. I think Mike Ilitch is still trying to recoup his losses from the past ten years. A hot dog cost $3, as does a small pop. Anyway, a inning or so into the game, I noticed that the seats in the first row were empty. (How someone could pay season tickets for those seats and not go is beyond me.) I tried to get my wife to go up there with Steven, but she wouldn't budge. I asked Cindy, my sister-in-law to go up front, and she did without hesitation. She took Steven, so naturally, Deborah and I had to call her father and my father and tell them to turn on the game and look for Steven behind the batter's box. He was easy to pick out, as Cindy was wearing her Red Wings Shanahan jersey. We left just after the Tigers tied the game up at one apiece. Baseball is funny in that games you'd never expect to become pitcher's duels, often end up being just that.

On our way out, we stopped at the Hockeytown Cafe. Cindy had never been there, so she wanted to check it out. When it came time to drive off, Deborah and I both forgot that I-94 is north of Comerica Park, not south. (We needed to take something other than I-96 as it was closed due to construction.) So, after a brief tour though beautiful Wyandotte, we turned around and worked our way back up I-75. Once safely on I-94, we took that to Telegraph. As you can tell, the ride home was a bit long and tedious. We made it home in one piece, however. Keithan was getting a little carsick during the last stretch, so thankfully the ride wasn't any longer than it was!

Accessing DB2 database using JDBC Type 3 driver

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 17:00:00 -0400

For some reason, I am not able to access the DB2 server using the DB2 JDBC Type 3 driver. I first tried creating a Database Connection within WebSphere studio. When that didn't work, I did a Google search and discovered that the DB2 server can get a little cranky when you try to access it using a Type 3 driver that doesn't match what is used by the server itself. So, I went to the server, found db2java.zip and copied it to my laptop. Using that driver wasn't any more successful, however.

Thinking that I must have been doing something wrong when creating the Database Connection, I created a simple Java class that creates the connection. I got the same error though:

COM.ibm.db2.jdbc.DB2Exception: [IBM][JDBC Driver]
CLI0621E  Unsupported JDBC server configuration.

Searching Google did provide me with some possible solutions, although none of them fixed the problem. I verified that the DB2 JDBC applet server service was running on the server, and it was. I ran db2jstrt 6789 on the server, but nothing changed. Hmm. I hate the idea of calling IBM Technical Support on this, as I don't think I want to spend too much time resolving this problem. The author of a page I found through Google referred to this problem as "the bane of my existence". I can see why. I wonder if there is a DB2 driver I could use instead? I've used the AS/400 Toolbox for Java to access a DB2 database in the past, and that worked fine.

FTP zip file using Java.

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 30 Apr 2004 15:00:00 -0400

On Wednesday, I finished writing a Java agent that creates zip files. My task today was to modify that agent so that it includes the Java code I'd used on a previous project that FTPs a file. This didn't take very long to do, as I'd just worked with this code a few weeks ago. Naturally, I wanted to test my code immediately, but didn't want to have to go through the trouble of putting in a Help ticket and then wait for a member of my customer's Notes team to review my code and sign it with an id that had unrestricted access. I asked Brandon, one of NuTechs' crack Notes administrators, if any of the NuTechs servers had FTP running on them. He said that our internal Red Hat server we're using to run a mirror image of our customer-facing website did. Since I hadn't had the chance (or the need) to install my copy of CuteFTP on my laptop, Brandon showed me how to with the FTP using a Windows Command Prompt, which he considered a "lost art". I created the directory that my Java agent would FTP the zip file to and ran my Java agent. Worked like a charm!

Desireable Disks est mort

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 21:00:00 -0400

I felt like getting out this evening, so I gathered up Steven and decided to pay a visit to Desireable Disks in Garden City. Much to my surprise, they were closed. A sign said that the site would eventually become an antique store. I had seen another used record store on Ford road before, but since it was getting dark I didn't think that it would be a good idea to go hunting for it tonight. Instead, Steven and I went on a search for inexpensive candy for my presentation next Tuesday. We finally hit on a $1 sale at CVS. I'm still amazed at the sheer quantity of candy you can get for $1. I figure that a little candy would help wake people up after the previous two hours of presentations by Rob and Brian.

On an unrelated but happy note, the Pistons beat the Bucks to win their series, 4-1. Go Pistons!

The Unisys Weather web service is no more

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 16:00:00 -0400

Last summer, I developed a Sametime bot that accessed the Unisys Weather web service to get the current weather for a US zip code. The bot stopped working sometime last fall, and I hadn't had the time to find out why until recently. After a thorough search of the Unisys website, I've determined that this web service is no longer available. Too bad, as I'd wanted to show this bot to those attending the NuTechs Sametime seminar next week Tuesday. I did find a possible replacement on the Cape Science website, as they have a Global Weather web service. While I hate to complain about anything that's free, this web service only returns the weather for a specified airport code. So, if I wanted to know the weather at Detroit Metro Airport, I'd need to enter "DTW". Not the most user-friendly web service out there, but if I can figure out how to access if from within Java, it would be a nice Bot to demo.

Test DB2 database

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 16:30:00 -0400

I've been harboring the idea that in preparation for next Tuesday's seminar on Sametime, I would show attendees how easy it would be to use a Bot to retrieve information from a DB2 database. This is, of course, contingent on having a DB2 database to query against. So, I asked one of the NuTechs Senior Domino administrators which of our WebSphere Portal or Workplace servers I could use for this purpose. He recommended our Lotus Workplace server, as right now it only used for demo purposes. At first I thought I would need to use WebSphere Studio to create a file containing Data Definition Language (DDL) that I would need to run on the server. Instead, I discovered that in addition to creating a database, I could also create the tables I needed as well using the DB2 Control Center on the server itself. I did find out that once you define a table, you can't go back and change the column definitions, though. There probably is a way to do this, but due to lack of time, I found it easier to simply drop the old table and recreate it.

Tiger tix

NuTechs — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 14:00:00 -0400

Les, NuTechs' CEO, offered my four tickets to Friday's tiger game. The seats are right behind home plate, row 15. I naturally said yes. If the team keeps improving, this could be my only chance for me and my family to see a game this close to the action. Since my son won't need a seat, I just need to find two more people to tag along.

Later this evening: Cindy, my sister-in-law, and her son Keithan, decided to join us. Cindy has never seen a game at Comerica Park, and Keithan has never seen a Tiger game period. Hopefully, the Tigers will oblige us with a decent effort.

Zipping files

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 28 Apr 2004 13:30:00 -0400

A project I'm currently working on required me to create a text file for each Notes document. That was relatively easy, as I've needed to do this countless times before. This project added a new wrinkle to this scenario, however. After all of the text files were created, I needed to create a zip file and add the text files to it. After doing a Google search on "Java zip file", I managed to locate some excellent sample code on DevShed. The sample code worked as designed and I easily incorporated it into my Java agent. Thank you, Google and thank you, DevShed!

Sametime Bots: coming soon to Lotus Advisor

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 14:15:00 -0400

While reviewing my Sametime Bot presentation, I realized that I had come up with some good material. Possibly Lotus Advisor article material. I've written nine articles for the Advisor over the past five years, and they've always liked the ideas I've submitted to them. I checked my back issues to see if anyone else had written about Sametime Bots before, and no one had. This surprised me, as Sametime Bots have essentially been around since 2003.

I e-mailed Liz Olsen and asked her if she'd be interested in my writing an article discussing how to create a Sametime Bot that accesses DB2. She replied this afternoon and said sure. The only suggestion from the tech editor who gave the go-ahead to the idea was to not focus on the WebSphere Studio IDE. While using WebSphere Studio does make it very easy to create, debug and run Java applications, it isn't strictly necessary. As any of you know who were involved with Java in the 1.0 days, you can do all of your Java programming using Notepad and an MS Dos prompt. Not that you would really want to do this in this day and age, but this approach is still valid. So, my next after-work project, after delivering my Sametime presentation next week, will be to start another article. As they say, "no rest for the wicked."

From nsftools: How To Spot A Fake Programmer

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 11:59:41 -0400

A very funny post on Julian Robichaux's blog. I wanted to have a link to it from my blog for future reference.

Re: Article idea

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 11:00:00 -0400

First WebSphere Advisor, and now e-pro magazine. I guess the technical publishing business is tougher than I thought:

I'd like to follow up with you on your suggestion to write an article for e-Pro Magazine. We have just made a strategic realignment of our e-Pro family of products, and as a result, the May 2004 issue of e-Pro Magazine will be our final one. Pending corporate approval, we will be re-launching e-Pro as a collection of electronic products (e-mail newsletters, blogs, Web site, e-learning) effective June 2004. However, there will not be an electronic facsimile of a magazine, and we currently have no appropriate place to use articles. We hope you will find our new e-Pro publications useful and entertaining. Look for lively opinion, insightful analysis, and a lot of practical, how-to tips. We also hope there will be an opportunity for you to contribute content for our new formats in the future.

Querysave event as Workflow engine: an interesting technique indeed

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 27 Apr 2004 10:39:24 -0400

About a year ago, a consultant I work with at NuTechs asked me if I still learn new things while developing Notes applications. I replied, possibly a bit arrogantly, that I rarely do. Well, several applications I've modified for one of my current customers uses a workflow technique that I had never heard of before. Instead of having users push a document through a workflow status via actions, buttons or scheduled agents, the Querysave event in each of the forms has Lotusscript code that asks the user whether the document should be promoted to the next status or not. For example:

While this technique does work, it has the unintended side effect of becoming extremely annoying, in my opinion at least. Personally, I can't imagine having to answer a prompt like this each time I save a document. If I had to, I would probably save documents very rarely, or possibly not use the application at all. I think that the only reason why my customer doesn't have a problem with this is that all of their workflow-driven applications are work this same way.

Sametime Bot presentation moving along

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 20:15:00 -0400

I just finished migrating my Sametime Bot presentation content from a MS Word document to the official NuTechs Powerpoint template. I have to say that the content still looks good, even though I hadn't looked at it at all since 3/13. Now I need to see if I can fix my WeatherBot and possibly create a DB2 Bot.

Notes agent using DB2 LSX progressing along nicely

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 26 Apr 2004 17:00:00 -0400

This agent will be responsible for importing data into Notes on a weekly basis. Sure, it would be nice to use LEI, or Replic-Action, or Percussion Powerflow. However, the customer I'm working for has not had a favorable experience using LEI, and having them purchase an alternative product would probably take many moons to come to fruition. So...I'm doing the heavy lifting myself.

Here's the logic of my Lotusscript agent, which will be scheduled to run once a week:

Delete any existing temporary Notes documents from the db (they were created in the previous run, but were not imported, possibly due to an Error)
Create a new Notes document for each record fetched from DB2. Each Notes document here contains a field called "Temp" that is set to 1
Delete all existing "production" Notes documents
Remove the "Temp" field from all of the "temp" Notes documents.

Whew! All of this heavy lifting is making me tired. I wish I could do something about all of the deletion stubs, but I have the suspicion that this db may be replicated onto other servers and/or laptops in the future. So, the deletion stubs need to stick around for now.

The agent seems to be working fine when I use NotesAgent.RunOnServer. Just to be sure, I've scheduled the agent to run on Wednesdays @ 2:00 AM.

CertFX review done and in the mail

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 15:30:00 -0400

I just sent my final draft of my review of the CertFX WebSphere Practice exams to the managing editor WebSphere Advisor. Whew! Now, onto my Sametime Bot presentation, which I need to give on 5/4.

DB2 DSN request approved

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 23 Apr 2004 11:00:00 -0400

Cool. Now I get to write my first Lotusscript agent that uses the DB2 LSX. Not that I'm flying blind here or anything. I have some sample code from two other NuTechnicians, Dan Phung and Kelly Johnson, to work with. Besides, I also have the Lotus Connector LotusScript Extensions Guide, which, despite its periodic incoherence, does have some good example code, especially for DB2.

Off I go, into the DB2 LSX Blue Yonder...

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 12:15:00 -0400

Gack. What a lousy title.

Today marks my first official foray into the world of the Lotus Connector for DB2. I'm hoping that I will be as successfull as I have been in the past when using the Oracle LSX, as opposed to the Sybase LSX. Although, in all fairness to the Sybase LSX, I was asking it to work with stored procedures with output parameters. Shame on me.

But first, there'll be a slight intermission as I need to submit a DSN request to have a connection to the DB2 database created on the Notes server. Please stand by...

CertFX Practice Exam review (practically) done!

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 21 Apr 2004 19:30:00 -0400

The last bits are usually the toughest: the subtitle, the abstract, updating my bio, referencing the screenshots. Now, all I need to do is have my wife check it over for me before I send it on. What? Your wife reviews your articles? Sure. She's just as nit-picky as I am. Besides, it beats asking my Mom.

Radio button spacing

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 11:00:00 -0400

Here's an ugly solution...
One of my customers asked me if there was a way I could put some space between each radio button option:

To do this, changed each of the keywords to use an alias. Each alias included pass-thru HTML that would put non-blanking spaces after the keyword:

1{&apm;nbsp;    } | 1
2{&apm;nbsp;    } | 2
3{&apm;nbsp;    } | 3
4{&apm;nbsp;    } | 4
5{&apm;nbsp;    } | 5
N/A | N/A

Giving me the desired result:

Its an ugly solution, but it works.

LS:DO no longer supported by Lotus (* 2)

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 14:20:00 -0400

This is the second time I've heard this. Again, it came from a member of my customer's Lotus support team. Since this particular customer has a very close relationship with Lotus, I have to believe them. Now I know that I don't read ever Technote or LDD posting that comes out, but why haven't I seen this mentioned in magazines like the Lotus Advisor or the View?

Wings Win!

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 17 Apr 2004 17:30:00 -0400

The Red Wings hung on and beat Nashville this afternoon 2-0. Curtis Joseph looked surprisingly good to me. I hope Manny Legacy gets another chance in the playoffs, either this year or next, as it really wasn't his fault the Wings lost those other games.

Finally started my review of the CertFX WebSphere Practice Tests

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 17 Apr 2004 16:00:00 -0400

Hopefully I can crank this out over the weekend. I have a presentation on Sametime Bots that I need to give at the "Web Conferencing, Instant Messaging, Pervasive Presence for Portal and Beyond" seminar NuTechs is holding on 5/4.

Tigers lose in another stinkeroo

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 16 Apr 2004 22:00:00 -0400

Boy, that pitching that sure looked good the first couple of weeks into the season suddenly looks fragile. Tigers lose to Cleveland, 10-3.

Balance of the Universe restored: Tigers lose, Red Wings win

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 15 Apr 2004 22:00:00 -0400

I got the strange feeling that the longer the Tigers kept winning, the longer the Red Wings would keep losing. The Red Wings won this evening, 4-1 over Nashville, while the Tigers got absolutely pummeled by Toronto, 11-0. I wonder if Mike Iitch is happy or sad at this turn of events? I imagine that since the Red Wings bring in more money than the Tigers, Mr. Iitch would rather have the Red Wings keep on winning. However, based on the lopsided score of the Tigers game, I'm hoping that this game was just a minor bump in the road, and not a complete detour back to last years foibles.

Interesting technique to say the least - pt. 2

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 14 Apr 2004 13:30:00 -0400

I learned something else today. In the File Cabinet application I mentioned in my previous post, the Lotusscript code makes use of an undocumented @Function:

@UpdateViewDesign

Whenever a Folder is renamed, the Lotusscript code uses this @Function to ensure that the renamed folder adheres to a Folder template present in the database. Very interesting indeed.

Interesting technique to say the least - pt. 1

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 14 Apr 2004 12:30:00 -0400

I was asked the other day to provide some emergency report for a customer who stores all of their documentation in a custom File Cabinet database. This database bears no relation to the Document Library template that ships with Notes. Instead, this is a home-grown application that reminds me of Dom.Doc. The database administrators configure categories and sub-categories in a profile document, and users select a category or subcategory to put the document into when it is saved. For example, the following would be a category:

NuTechs

while this would be a sub-category

NuTechs\Groupware NuTechs\Groupware\Notes NuTechs\Groupware\Notes\R5

The database administrator can define up to three levels of sub-categories (or sub-sub-sub-categories). When a category/sub-category is created, an associated Folder design element is created at the same time. Instead of creating binders like Dom.Doc, this application uses categories/sub-categories. So, how is this collection of Folders used exactly?
When a user creates a new document, they can select either a category or a subcategory for the document to be assigned to. The user is presented with the following dialog box that they can use to select a category:

The view being displayed is designed so that Folder design elements I have to admit that this is a novel approach to this UI. I would have just given the user a Dialog List field and had them select the category/sub-category from that. This is the first time I've seen a production Notes application incorporate a view that displays Folder design elements into the UI. I've read about this technique before in the Lotus Advisor, but can't remember what issue that article appeared in. (I'll update this post when I find out.)

Dearborn Music trip finally successful

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 13 Apr 2004 19:30:00 -0400

Steven and I went to Dearborn Music this evening. I know, the Red Wings were on. But as I've said before, I've watched a lot of hockey games in my (relatively brief) lifetime, and I hardly ever get the chance to go to a decent used record store anymore.

I didn't find anything on my list, but did manage to find a copy of The Cure's Bloodflowers for $9. I had made an audio tape of that CD a year or so ago, but the CD skipped, making one of the songs fairly trippy. I also found a CD my wife was looking for, Kevin Toney by Lovescape. Afterwards, Steven and I went Krogering. While I actually like grocery shopping, Steven gets the added bonus of eating a Krispy Kreme donut while I shop. That kid has the metabolism of a bumble bee.

Confirmed: Sametime Bot presentation for NuTechs seminar

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 13 Apr 2004 16:30:00 -0400

I just received confirmation from Brian O'Curran, Account Representative extraordinare, that I will be giving a thirty-minute presentation on Sametime Bots to those customers who sign up for the NuTechs seminar to be held on 5/4. Here's a copy of the invitation for those who may be interested in attending:
Did you know that if you are on active software maintenance for Notes/Domino you get (ie, you are entitled to use) Lotus Instant Messaging (IM) within the Notes and Domino environment at no additional charge!?!?!

Did you know Sametime:

Reduces need for business travel, delivering fast and often measurable return on investment,
Provides instant, anytime access to people and information through integrated presence awareness and conversation,
Virtually brings together centralized and geographically dispersed individuals and teams,
Improves individual and team productivity,
Enables faster, more informed decision-making by bringing people together,
Improves general and customer-specific response times,
Reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) by providing a set of real-time capabilities in a single product offering,
I could go on and on.... wait, one more....
73% of companies standardizing on an instant messaging platform have selected Lotus Sametime (Osterman research)

So, it's yours to use (if you're on maintenance) and it has huge business impact, why not spend a couple hours finding out how this technology will transform your business and make you a hero! Oh, you're already using Sametime? Great, let us show you how to take the value it delivers to the next level; embed it in applications, portal and then.... go wireless.

Who: NuTechs, IBM Premier Business Partner in Michigan
What: Extreme Sametime Seminar
Where: IBM Building, Southfield, 18000 West Nine Mile, Room 1505
When: May 4th, 8:30 am
How To: Please preregister at our website. (www.nutechs.com)
Details: See Agenda below

Registration / Breakfast 8:30 am
Intros and Housekeeping 9:00 am
Sametime Overview 9:05 am - 9:50 am

Components/Architecture
Sametime Instant Messaging
Web Conferencing

Taking Sametime to the next level 9:50 am - 10:20 am

Sametime awareness in Domino Applications
Sametime on handheld devices (STEP)

BREAK 10:20 am - 10:30 am

Sametime Presence in Portal, Workplace 10:30 am - 11:15 am
Sametime BOTS - 11:15 am - 11:45'ish

Tigers win and Red Wings Lose (!)

Michael Sobczak — Sun, 11 Apr 2004 18:30:00 -0400

Boy, Mike Ilitch must be shaking his head these days. He spends modestly on the Tigers, and they're 5-1. He spends lavishly on the Red Wings, and they lose their first road playoff game. Of course, the Red Wings played very well over an entire season, while the Tigers have just put together a good week of baseball. It remains to be seen whether the Tigers can put together a season comparable to last year's Kansas City Royals, or Florida Marlins.

The whole world's going to Hell(boy)

Michael Sobczak — Sun, 11 Apr 2004 17:30:00 -0400

My Dad and I went to see Hellboy this afternoon. Yep, while the Red Wings game was going on. I guess when you've seen as many playoff games as my Dad and I have over the last ten years, missing one quarterfinal game doesn't mean as much as it would to say, a Predators fan. Seeing the movie was probably a good idea, based on how the game turned out. Hellboy was actually a decent movie. I think it was missing an engaging climax at the end, but all in all, not a bad movie to see. Of course, I consider it only a warm-up to Spider-Man 2, coming out this May.

Dearborn Music closed

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 10 Apr 2004 21:40:00 -0400

Drat! Their website said that they were open until 10:00 PM. Oh well, there was a Meijer's across the street, so Steven and I stopped there to pick up some non-essentials and the latest edition of Entertainment Weekly. The cover says that there is a '90s quiz inside. Excellent! Who says there's no fun in suburbia?

Easter brunch

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 10 Apr 2004 15:45:00 -0400

My wife's family came over for Easter brunch today. Ten members of my wife's immediate family were on hand, the only one not present being her niece, Lia, who isn't due in from Grand Rapids later this evening. It was good to see my nephew Carlo again. He had a rough year last year, enduring several surgeries and hospitals stays as a result of Chron's Disease. He looked good, considering all he'd gone through.
Everyone left at around 3:00 PM, with my sister-in-law, Cindy, staying to watch some of the Red Wings game before heading to work at Marshall Fields. She's probably one of the biggest Red Wings fans I know, and certainly the biggest Brendan Shanahan fan I know. She manages to go to several games a year due to friends with season tickets who just can't make it to a particular game. She has never actually paid to see a game, which is good considering how much they cost. She's never gone to a playoff game. I can say that I have actually experienced one, although it wasn't the experience I expected. I think they lost to the Winnipeg Jets 1-0 or 2-1.

Update development db w/ production content

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 9 Apr 2004 16:00:00 -0400

I've been enhancing the design used for a client's intranet site, and so far the changes have been well received. My customer told me this morning that he'd like to put a link on the production site that users could click on to preview the new version of the intranet. Initially, my customer asked me if we could put all of the design elements that make up the new version into the production design. I recommended against this as the current design already has 184 design elements. Adding an additional set of design elements would make maintaining the design of the db a very difficult task. Instead, I suggested that I create a scheduled agent that would copy new and modified documents from the production database over to the development db. This would be very similar to an agent in application I supported for another customer. After an hour or so, I had the agent up and running and faithfully updating the content in the development db.

I'm NOT Lovin' It

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 8 Apr 2004 13:00:00 -0400

Somehow, I managed to spend almost $5 for lunch at McDonald's today.
After presenting at the DNP DominoFest, I decided to pick up some lunch on the way to a client site. Since McDonald's was about a mile from the site, I decided to pull into the drive-thru and get something. While I've never been to crazy about McDonald's chicken sandwhiches, I hadn't had one in a while so I figured it was worth a shot. As it turned out, this McDonald's was no ordinary McDonald's. Instead of the normal squak boxes, this McDonald's has "person to person" ordering. Or was it "face to face" ordering? Whatever. So, instead of yelling my order into a speaker, I needed to interact with an actual person. Of course, that didn't make placing my order any easier. The girl on the other side asked me which chicken sandwhich I wanted. There were two varieties, one with only white meat and the other with what I'd assume is mystery meat. So, I went with the all white meat version. I also asked her if I could substitute my pop for a bottle of water. Sure, she said. When she told me that the total was $4.88, I wondered what the heck happened. I was so hungry and pressed for time I just paid for my order and left. When I got to the office, I took a closer look at my bill. The chicken sandwhich and fries was $3.50. I'm not sure, but I think the water was $1.10, and was extra. So, I paid almost $5 for a mediocre chicken sandwhich and semi-crispy fries. So, can someone tell me why McDonald's had such a great year last year? Give me Burger King any time.

Presentation going well

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 8 Apr 2004 11:32:00 -0400

Everyone is enthralled with Jake's template. I'll have to tell him!

First (and only) Domino Blog presentation run-thru

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 7 Apr 2004 23:30:00 -0400

I just finished running thru my Domino Blog presentation. My gracious audience was my wife, Deborah, and my son, Steven. (My son just doesn't fall asleep until midnight these days.) My wife has been a big help in my push over the past several weeks to get my presentation ready. She proofread my slides for me several times, and came up with several good questions that caused me to revise my content. I definitely owe her a world of thanks. Little did she know that when she married me back in '97, it would be for better, for worse, or for presentation anxiety!
I'm a little concerned that I may have too much content for a fifty minute presentation. Now that I have an actual presentation to look at, it may have been better to just focus on one Domino blog template. I've heard that its better to have more material than you need than less material. My wife said not to worry about my presentation too much. I'm well prepared, and that is the key to giving a good presentation. Tomorrow morning, I'll definitely find out if that's true.

Blog presentation finally done

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 7 Apr 2004 22:00:00 -0400

Talk about getting close to the deadline. I finally finished transferring all of my presentation content from several Word documents into PowerPoint. I couldn't figure out what to do for the look of my PowerPoint slides, so I used the presentation file I used when I last gave a presentation DNP (back in June 2001) as a starting. Talk about cannibalizing one's past.

LS:DO no longer supported by Lotus

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 7 Apr 2004 15:00:00 -0400

I was surprised when a member of my customer's Lotus support team mentioned this. According to him, only LC LSX is supported. Hmm...why hadn't I heard about this before? Seems like this would be an important thing for all Lotus Notes/Domino developers to know.

Any Domino bloggers in Nashville?

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 7 Apr 2004 09:30:00 -0400

I was wondering if anyone would like to take me up on a bet on who will win the playoff series between the Red Wings and the Predators. I figure if I lose, I can drive down and personally deliver something made in the Detroit area. (No, not a new Suburban.) A dozen coney dogs probably wouldn't survive the trip. Maybe some official Made in Detroit wear?

And if the Red Wings win? Although I heard that fried 'nanner sandwiches are delicious, I'd want something a bit more substantial. (No, not two tickets to Dollywood.)

Its time to get religion, folks

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 6 Apr 2004 21:45:00 -0400

The Tigers won again. For those of you not familiar with the trials and tribulations of our beloved Bengal's, they hadn't won two games to open a season since 1985. What's next? The Detroit Lions in the SuperBowl?

Another deep dive into Domino Blog

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 6 Apr 2004 20:00:00 -0400

Now that my son's feeling better, I decided to have another go at Steve Castledine's Domino Blog template. The first time around, I don't think I really "got" how this template works. For example, I wanted to display an "Add" comments link underneath each blog entry. I first created a copy of the Default Template for documents and renamed it "New Template". Next, I edited the New Template document and added the <$DXAddComment$> tag to the left of the existing <$DXReadComment$> tag. I then updated the Site Configuration document and changed the Default Site Template from "Default Template" to "New Template". When I checked out my test Domino Blog site, Notesaholic, the "Add" link still didn't appear.
After thinking about this for a bit, I realized that the Document Template must be the template used when you access a blog via a permalink. That meant that I needed to make these changes to the default Content List or Item List template document instead. (For some reason, these particular templates are referred to as Content List templates in the navigator, but when you open these documents, the title at the top of the form is Item List Template.) I followed the same steps as above, this time starting with the default Item List Template document, and the change worked!
Feeling ambitious, I created a copy of the default Site Template and added these features:

added the <$DXQuote$> tag to display the Site Quote I'd entered into the Site Configuration document
added the <$DXRecentComments$> tag to display the five most recent comments entered by readers
added the <$DXReferrers$> tag to display the most recent referrers

I also updated the Site Configuration document to display the number of Monthly Archive entries for each month, as well as the number of blogs in each category. When I checked out my Notesaholic site again, all of these features were working as designed. The only problem I found is that the left side navigation bar was being covered up by the blog item list. Due to the presence of {DIV} tags in the Site I figured that this had to be due to the cascading style sheet being used to control the positioning of the blocks that make up the site. Sure enough, the Site Configuration document has an "External Stylesheet" setting that pointed to global.css. I found this stylesheet in the Resources area and created a copy of it called new.css. I'm not the most style sheet savy person out there, so it took me a little while to find out that the style sheet I needed to modify in order to change the position of the item list was this one:

#content {
	    margin-right:10px;
               margin-top:0px;
	    margin-left:245px;
	    position:absolute;
	    background:#FFF;
	    margin-bottom:20px;
	    border:1px solid #999999;
	    width:650px;
		}

I modified the margin-left property, changing it from 210px to 245px. I then changed the Site Configuration to use my new External Stylesheet, and when I checked Notesaholic on the web the item list block was no longer covering up the navigation block. I made some other modifications to new.css, which I won't get into here.
After playing around with the Template documents, the CSS document and the Site Configuration document, I can definitely say that I'm very impressed by what Steve Castledine has come up with. While it took me a while to figure out how to change the look and feel of my test site, now that I know how to customize Domino Blog, I can how powerful a blog template it really is. I can see why Steve decided to hide the design of his template. Its definitely a product that one could sell to customers.

Exciting WebSphere Advisor News

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 6 Apr 2004 14:30:00 -0400

Received this from the Managing Editor of WebSphere Advisor:

Hi WebSphere Advisor writers and speakers,

I have some very exciting news about WebSphere Advisor. To meet reader demand for more content more often, WebSphere Advisor is now a weekly, online-only publication. Every week, I'll be releasing a new "issue" of WebSphere Advisor filled with industry news, a how-to article, interviews and perspective, and great WebSphere tips. You can visit the new site at: http://WebSphereAdvisor.com.

Now that the relaunch is behind me, I can apologize to those of you I haven't responded to as quickly as I normally do. :) It's been an exciting process, but it's certainly taken a lot of my time. So, please keep those articles flowing my way, and I'll hopefully be able to publish them more quickly than the print publication allowed. This new format doesn't change the article process, or the types of articles I've traditionally run in WebSphere Advisor. It just lets us give the readers more of the high-quality content they've come to expect from WebSphere Advisor more often.

If you have any questions about the new format, please don't hesitate to ask.

I look forward to working with you to continue to make WebSphere Advisor a success.

The latest in invoking a Sybase stored procedure w/ LSX

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 6 Apr 2004 10:15:00 -0400

My EI support contact let me know that he was able to connect to the stored procedure using

con.Procedure = "server.dbo.PROCEDURENAME"

However, he encountered the same problem I was experiencing. Unless the output parameter is included as an input parameter, the code will not run. He suggested rewriting the stored procedure in Lotusscript, which will not work as then my customer would have two codestreams to support. When asked if he knew of any other applications that interact with Sybase, and while there were, the Lotusscript/LSX code within them did not provide any insight into how to resolve this problem. The plot thickens...

Personal day

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 6 Apr 2004 08:15:00 -0400

My son had a pretty rough night last night. My wife was up with him throughout the night until early this morning, trying to get him to fall asleep. He cried a lot, but we couldn't find anything physically wrong with him. He seems OK now, but I'm going to stay home today and take care of my son so that my wife can get some rest. I suspect that he's finally cutting his back molars, which are way overdue.

Still updating the blog list

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 5 Apr 2004 23:15:00 -0400

I stayed up late updating the list of blogs in the DNP website. For each blog, I specified which Domino Blog template was being used (domBlog, BlogSphere or Domino Blog). I probably would have gotten this done in an hour of so if I didn't stop to read each blog along the way. Doing that proved extremely useful, as I learned about Dueling Peeps from Volker Weber's blog. Very useful stuff indeed. Warren Elsmore's blog had a link to the Belle Du Jour blog. Isn't it great that the internet is changing so many lives in such interesting ways?

Brian O'Curran refuses to blog

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 5 Apr 2004 17:00:00 -0400

I tried to convince Brian to start his own weblog, but he wouldn't budge. To me, Brian seems like a natural for a blog: he has a great sense of humor and always has something interesting to say. If you think Brian should (or should not) start a blog, comment on this blog.

For those of you who don't know Brian personally, I wrote about him in this post back in February. As if that weren't enough, here's a brief bio:

member of Enterprise Consulting when they won the Lotus Beacon Award for Best Business Impact in 1997 for the SCORE project
Technical Account Manager for Lotus Consulting/Lotus Software for six years
gave six presentations to the Detroit Notes Professionals from 1998-2003 on topics ranging from Notes R5 client enhancements to Quickplace
joined NuTechs as an Account Manager this year in February
is a Jethro Tull fanatic
dances an awesome Lindy upon request

Now I ask you, why wouldn't everyone want to hear from Brian on a daily basis???

The End is Near

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 5 Apr 2004 16:00:00 -0400

By now you know that the Detroit Tigers, the 43-119 Detroit Tigers of a year ago, beat the Toronto Blue Jays this afternoon in Toronto, 7-0. I don't know about you, but I'm getting my rosary out right now and praying...

ESPN.com recap Detroit Tigers Weblog

Bizzare Notes security problem solved

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 5 Apr 2004 15:30:00 -0400

Well, I hadn't anticipated this sort of security problem before. A user of an application I'm currently developing kept telling me that she couldn't see all of the documents. This application currently resides on development server in a development Notes domain. I checked to make sure she was in the "Editors" group, which she was. This group was included in a role that allowed members to read all documents in the database. At first I thought there was something wrong with the subroutine that was adding Readers and Authors fields to the documents. As it turned out, the problem was due to the development server not having a replica of the production domain's NAB. This was truely bizzare as the other development server I've used in the past has a replica of the production domain's NAB. I guess those eight years of experience paid off today. Of course, checking for the production NAB was the last thing I thought of...

BlogSphere testing

Michael Sobczak — Sun, 4 Apr 2004 11:47:12 -0400

As you can see, I've added a much larger (and more impressive) "Lord Lotus" logo. Very important indeed.

domBlog to BlogSphere migration?

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 3 Apr 2004 18:00:00 -0400

I spent a few hours today writing an agent that transfers entries from this site to my Lord Lotus BlogSphere test site. I thought this would be a good idea in case I decide to go with BlogSphere at a future date. Also, I thought it would be good for my upcoming presentation to have a BlogSphere-based site that has the same content as a domBlog-based site. My agent doesn't transfer over comments yet, and I haven't figured out what to do about the image resources I have in my domBlog site. I thought about transferring my blogs into my Domino Blog-based site, but since the Domino Blog design is hidden, it would require a lot of detective work on my part to figure out how to do this.

Unrestricted access - pt. 6 (FTP file is there!)

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 2 Apr 2004 15:00:00 -0400

My customer e-mailed me and told me that the xml file my agent FTPd to the Sybase server did make it onto the server. For some reason, instead of landing in this directory:

dir1/dir2/dir4/dir4

it landed here:

dir1/dir2/dir4

I can change the destination FTP directory so that it has a "/" at the end. Of course, this is pure guesswork on my behalf.

Unrestricted access - pt. 5 (where did it go?)

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 1 Apr 2004 14:45:00 -0400

My customer let me know that he didn't see the file my agent FTPd on the server. Puzzled, I asked him to check and see if its anywhere on the server. I'm not familliar with the Java code that handles the FTP. The JAR that is used by the agent is:

oroinc/NetComponents-1.3.8a/NetComponents.jar

and is reference in the code via this import statement:

import com.oroinc.net.ftp.*;

I'm wondering if it may have been FTPd to the root directory for some reason. I asked my customer to search the server for the xml file name to see where it may have landed.

Unrestricted access - pt. 4 (FTP agent ran successfully)

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 1 Apr 2004 14:00:00 -0400

I ran the latest version of my agent, and it appeared to work. Hooray! I've asked my customer to look at the server to see if its there or not.

Unrestricted access - pt. 3

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 1 Apr 2004 12:30:00 -0400

I needed to modify my agent again to reflect that the text file was being created in a specific directory on the Notes server. The code I originally received created the file in the default directory, which was the Notes server program directory. So, I've made the appropriate change and asked my friend to sign my agent again. Hopefully, this last change does the trick.

Sybase user id must have access to execute the stored procedure

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 1 Apr 2004 10:00:00 -0400

My EI support contact figured that since the userid I gave him does have access to execute the stored procedure that returns a value, it must have access to run the other stored procedure that returns a value in an output parameter. He's been learning how to use DBArtisan on the fly, and misinterpreted what its security screens were telling him. His next step is to try to execute the stored procedure in question using DBArtisan to see what value it returns. (LSX)

Unrestricted Access - pt. 2

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 15:00:00 -0400

The person who's working with me on granting unrestricted access to my Notes agent let me know that my agent would need a few modifications. While I followed good design practice in using script libraries, the customer we work for doesn't allow script libraries unrestricted access to the Notes server. So, I needed to move all of the code I referenced in two script libraries into my agent. (This was no big deal as it essentially this amounted to one subroutine and one custom class.) Next, I needed to modify my code so that it retrieved the directory where the file will be created to a profile document. That way, if the Notes server is moved to a platform other than Windows, the code won't need to be updated to reflect the underlying OS change. A few hours later, I had the changes in place and asked him to sign the agent for me. I can't wait to try this out to see if it actually works. Could creating a text file and FTPing it to another server really be this simple? I'll soon find out...

No luck executing Sybase stored procedure using LEI either

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 13:30:00 -0400

My EI support contact didn't have any luck invoking the stored procedure using LEI. He's getting the same error messages as before. (LSX)

Application migration

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 11:45:00 -0400

Starting at 10:00 AM today, I helped migrate an application from one Notes server to another. This was done primarily so that remote/mobile users wouldn't need to access the application via a passthru box. The passthru server prevented me from modifying some complex Lotusscript code in this application so that a user could retry the last action taken whenever their wireless connection to the Notes server died. (I'll post more about this at a later date.) The application needed to remain on its source server due to a scheduled agent that updated documents based on data in two other databases. The sizes of these other databases made it prohibitive for their to be replicas of them on the new server. Also, my customer is using R5, which means that a scheduled agent can only access dbs on the server where it is currently running. (Yeah, I could have written a Java application that would access the databases on the other server using CORBA/DIIOP, but my customer isn't at the point where they could easily support that type of solution.)

To prevent users from accessing the old replica but allow the destination server to replicate changes to and from the source server, the ACLs of both replicas needed to be changed appropriately. Each replica would have a distinct ACL that wouldn't affect each other. This meant that the destination server needed Manager access to its replica, while the source server only had Designer access. The exact opposite was true for the replica on the source server. The only hiccup I encountered was when I asked the Notes admin to replicate the database between the two servers using the Notes client. Since the Notes admin was a manager in both ACLs, he effectively pushed the ACL of the destination server's replica over to the replica on the source server. When we double-checked the ACLs after replication, we realized what had happened and modified the Advanced replication settings so that ACL changes would not replicate. (Tip: print out copies of the ACLs used in both replicas before making changes and testing replication. You can do this by generating a Design Synopsis for just the ACL, or printing the documents representing both dbs in the Database Catalog.)

In case users tried (either intentionally or unintentionally) to access the replica on the source server, I modified the design so that the database would display a page with a message stating that the application has been moved, as well as a button that would remove the icon from their workspace and add one for the replica on the destination server. Unfortunately, using a button to change the desktop icon wasn't as smooth as I wanted it to be. This is the code behind the button:

oldServer := "source/Domain";
oldPath := "apps\\app.nsf";
newServer := "destination/Domain";
newPath := "apps\\app.nsf";
@Command ( [WindowWorkspace] );
@Command ( [AddDatabase]; oldServer : oldPath );
@Command ( [FileDatabaseRemove] );
@Command ( [AddDatabase]; newServer : newPath );
@Command ( [FileOpenDatabase]; newServer : newPath )

Unfortunately, when a user clicks on this button, they get two cryptic messages back from Notes. The first one:

As you can see, it isn't clear at all for most Notes users what will actually be removed if you click on Yes. The second:

Is a result of my not being able to use @Command([FileCloseWindow]) to close the page after the button had been clicked. @Command([FileCloseWindow]) always executes after all other @Functions have executed. If the users were V6 users, I could have used the new @Command( [CloseWindow] ) instead. Oh well. All in all, the migration went fairly smoothly.

I guess I don't know my own strength

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 31 Mar 2004 10:00:00 -0400

A user I had made some reporting enhancements for a few weeks back asked me for some help today. I spoke with her last Friday and came up with a way for her to clear up a problem she was experiencing with a balance amount on her report. The solution involved creating an additional document that would reflect items that had already been shipped but had not been recorded as received into inventory. Doing this would create a balance amount that was a positive number. While I was showing her how to do this, I didn't realize how quickly I was navigating among several Notes views and documents via tabs. When she came up to me this morning, she apologized and said that she should have taken notes when I was showing her how to do this last week. I told her that I've been using and programming in Notes for eight years, and I typically navigate through Notes quicker than most end users. So, I went though what I had covered with her last Friday and promised to create some documentation for her to refer to in the future. I guess its easy to forget that while I'm comfortable navigating Notes at warp speed, most end users prefer a slower, more deliberate approach.

Rich text w/pictures

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 22:01:49 -0400

This blog has a picture in it:

This picture has a hotspot:

Just plain old text in this blog entry

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 20:41:00 -0400

Here is some of my text

Unrestricted access - pt. 1

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 30 Mar 2004 11:00:00 -0400

Earlier this morning, I contacted the Help Desk and entered a ticket requesting access to create a text file on a development Notes server. After waiting several hours (just call me Mr. Patience) for the ticket to get routed to the appropriate person (who I know by name), I decided to e-mail that person directly. Thankfully, he went ahead and assigned the ticket to himself and let me know what the next steps were. He let me know that he needed to review my code before granting it unrestricted access to the server.

Sybase userid may not have access to run stored procedure

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 15:00:00 -0400

The Enterprise Integration (EI) support contact I'm working with said that the Sybase userid I gave him may not have the proper rights to execute the stored procedure. When he executes the stored procedure using the Sybase LSX, he gets either this error:

Error # 12325: Error: Stored procedure 'procedure' not found. Specify owner.objectname or use sp_help to check whether the object exists

or this error:

Error # 12325: Error User name 'user' not found., Connector 'sybase', Method -Call' (509)

In either case, he does get the same result I did, a field called compute1 containing "0".

Creating a flat file is more difficult that it appears...

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 27 Mar 2004 21:30:00 -0400

or should be. It seems that even though I'm creating the XML file on a dev box, I don't have permission in the server doc to do so. Looks like I'll need to call the Help Desk on Monday and start a ticket.

BlogSphere

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 27 Mar 2004 15:30:00 -0400

I finally got a chance to take a look at OpenNTF.org's BlogSphere template. I have to say I was impressed. Unlike ProjectDX.org's DominoBlog template, the design of BlogSphere isn't hidden. So that lets a Notes/Domino developer like myself take a closer look under the covers. Not that I really had any time to do that today, but (to quote an old GM advertizing tagline) isn't it nice to know that its there? It would have been nice to have some documentation, or even field help for the Blog Config form. What some of the settings mean isn't apparant to a blog novice like myself. The Notes UI is very nice, comparable to DominoBlog. I know that blogs are intended primarily for web users, but if a Notes person is using a Domino-based blog template, it makes sense to be able to post blogs via Notes. That reminds me, I need to sent Jake Howlett my Notes design elements. I gave them to Rob Wunderlich a while back, and he definitely thought it helped posting tremendously.

This is a test

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 27 Mar 2004 15:23:16 -0400

This is a test of the BlogSphere system.

If this had been an actual posting, you would have felt compelled to respond.

Received ten license keys

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 26 Mar 2004 09:45:00 -0400

Jason sent me ten license keys this morning. Jason then sent me the following response to my original request:

Here's our list of WebSphere practice tests:

000-285 Developing with IBM WebSphere Studio, V5.0
*000-286 Application Development with IBM WebSphere Studio, V5.0
*000-287 Enterprise Application Development with IBM WebSphere Studio, V5.0
*000-288 Developing Web Services with WebSphere Studio Application Developer V5.1
000-340 IBM WebSphere Application Server, V5.0, Basic Administration
000-341 IBM Certified Advanced System Administrator - WebSphere Application Server V5.0
*000-347 IBM WebSphere Portal V5.0, Deployment and Administration
*000-348 IBM WebSphere Portal V5.0, Application Development

The ones with an * are pending release and will be released in the next two or three weeks. I have sent you 10 practice test keys. You can use them as you see fit.

Requested WebSphere Practice Test keys

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 17:30:00 -0400

I e-mailed Jason that WebSphere Advisor has accepted my review of the CertFX WebSphere Practice Tests, and that I plan on submitting my review to Ellie on 4/23. I asked him for the license keys for the exams so that I will be able to download the exams when I'm ready to begin writing my review.

CertFX WebSphere Practice Test review a go!

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 24 Mar 2004 18:00:00 -0400

Since Ellie hadn't responded to the e-mail I sent her on 3/16, I decided to give her a call. Jason Collier asked me over a month ago (2/11) to review the WebSphere Practice Tests, and I felt like he deserved an answer as to whether I would be able to do this for him or not. So I called Ellie at the number I had in my PNAB, and she was there. She said that calling her direct is often a better way to get a response from her rather than e-mail. She accepted my product review idea for WebSphere Advisor, and we established 4/23 as the date I would send my review to her. She said to just tell her if I need more time to complete the review. She also said that it would be okay if I need to go beyond the usual 800 word limit for my review. I'm not sure how I could devote more than 800 words to a practice test, but its nice to know that I don't have to worry about a word limit. For those of you who read this blog, you can probably tell that I can spend 800 words without too much effort.

FTP using Java

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 24 Mar 2004 16:00:00 -0400

An application that I currently support contains a Lotusscript agent that uses FTP to retrieve a file from a hosted application. This agent creates a BAT file that contains all of the commands necessary to have Windows/Dos FTP the file. One problem with this approach is that the agent never knows when the FTP has finished. To account for this limitation of Dos-based FTP, the program will sleep for a set number of seconds after a shell() call. What would be nice is to know how many records were included in the FTP file when processing has finished. Offhand, I didn't know of a way to get any information back from a Dos Prompt opened via shell(). Sure, I could open the file using Lotusscript and cycle through each line in the file, but that seems like a hack, an even bigger hack than using shell() to execute a BAT file.

Since I'm pretty knowledgeable about Java programming, I figured there was a way to do this using Java. Unfortunately, the agent that does the Dos Prompt FTP never encountered a problem while I was supporting it. As fate would have it, I have had no luck using LSX to update Sybase tables. That means I need to consider Plan D: creating an XML file and placing it onto the Sybase server using FTP. It just so happens that another Notes developer who has also done development for the same group of customers I'm working with now has already done this. In fact, he even has a Java agent that FTPs files. Now, if I could only figure out how it worked...

JDBC and Sybase, so much for Plan C

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 24 Mar 2004 13:00:00 -0400

After having no luck with LS:DO and LSX, I figured it was worth a shot to try to use JDBC to access the Sybase stored procedure. Based on my experience a few years ago writing servlets that connected to DB2 databases, I thought doing the same with Sybase would be just as simple. I downloaded jConnect 5.5 from the Sybase website (its categorized under middleware), and created a simple Java agent that makes a connection to the Sybase server. Unfortunately, when I ran the agent, I got this nice Exception:

java.lang.SecurityException: sybase.server.com,-1
	at lotus.notes.AgentSecurityManager.checkConnect(AgentSecurityManager.java:172)
	at java.net.InetAddress.getAllByName0(InetAddress.java:579)
	at java.net.InetAddress.getAllByName0(InetAddress.java:560)
	at java.net.InetAddress.getByName(InetAddress.java:469)
	at java.net.Socket.(Socket.java:121)
	at com.sybase.jdbc2.timedio.RawDbio.doConnect(RawDbio.java:88)
	at com.sybase.jdbc2.timedio.InStreamMgr.(InStreamMgr.java:94)
	at com.sybase.jdbc2.tds.Tds.login(Tds.java:364)
	at com.sybase.jdbc2.jdbc.SybConnection.tryLogin(SybConnection.java:218)
	at com.sybase.jdbc2.jdbc.SybConnection.regularConnect(SybConnection.java:195)
	at com.sybase.jdbc2.jdbc.SybConnection.(SybConnection.java:174)
	at com.sybase.jdbc2.jdbc.SybConnection.(SybConnection.java:126)
	at com.sybase.jdbc2.jdbc.SybDriver.connect(SybDriver.java:179)
	at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:543)
	at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:163)
	at JavaAgent.NotesMain(JavaAgent.java:59)
	at lotus.domino.AgentBase.runNotes(Unknown Source)
	at lotus.domino.NotesThread.run(NotesThread.java:208)

Hmm. Looks like its on to Plan D: XML file.

Searching Domino views

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 23 Mar 2004 17:00:00 -0400

One of my customers asked me to enhance an application so that users would be able to search views when accessing the application via a browser. I had to think a little while, as I'd actually done this only two times since I started developing applications in Domino. The easiest way is to give the user an action that executes @Command( [ViewShowSearchBar] ; onOff ). This opens the default Domino search form and provides the user with a simple way to perform a full text search of the database. You can then add a $$SearchDefaultTemplate so that the search results are displayed in a special format. For the application in question, the user wanted me to limit the searching to the view the user currently had open.

After digging through my archive, I found a form that provided the user with the basic fields needed, like MaxResults, ExactMatch, UseThesaurus and Sort. When the user clicks on the [Submit] button, the $$Return field constructs query and redirects the browser to a designated search view. Essentially, the form was a modified of the "Web Search Simple" form in the Search Site template. This technique isn't too complicated, but I was surprised that I found no articles about it in the Lotus Advisor. There was an old Iris Today article on the Lotus Developer Domain (LDD) dating back to 1998, predating R5. I'd figure that providing web users with an easy way to either perform a full text search or a view search would be something customers would want to add to all of their Domino applications, but I see it so infrequently I wonder if few customers even know that its possible. (Of course, someone requested that I add searching capabilities to the DNP Discussion forum about a year ago, and I still haven't gotten to it...)

Estimation

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 22 Mar 2004 21:00:00 -0400

I finished coming up with a rough estimate for an enhancement request to an existing Notes application. The application was rather simplistic, but it looked to me as if it was doing its job. I suspect it was developed by someone with little or no Lotus Notes development experience. I really thought I wouldn't see a production Notes application with no Lotusscript code after R5 came out. In a way, its nice to know that there are still people out there who can use the product to quickly come up with an application to meet their needs without going through weeks of training and what not. For those of us who've been in this business for a while (I've been at it since '96), its easy to forget what made Notes became such a successful product in the first place. Notes is a great rapid application development (RAD) platform. Even compared to something like MS Access, getting a simple application up and running, with a form or two and a few views, can be done in a few days, or even a day. To this day, very few platforms can lay claim to that.

Another day, another fruitless go-around with LSX

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 20 Mar 2004 18:00:00 -0400

I created a simplified Lotusscript agent who's sole purpose is to connect to Sybase via the Lotus Connector and invoke a stored procedure. I tweaked several times, but could not find a way to run the code without including the output parameter as an input parameter. And LSX won't return a value into a field used as an input parameter. That, of course, makes sense. What doesn't make sense is that the sample code I found in the Nov/Dec 2003 issue of The View is almost exactly the same as I set up my code. The only difference I can see is that for Sybase I needed to set the LCConnection.Server property. Other than that, my code is identical. I get the feeling that regardless of what the Lotus Connector documentation says, LSX works differently for each RDBMS. If that's the case, then my initial hunch would be correct: I should have written a Java agent and used JDBC to insert records into Sybase all along. Perhaps I'll get the chance to prove/disprove my hunch next week...

More LSX attempts, downloaded Sybase jConnect

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 19 Mar 2004 20:30:00 -0400

I tried several more variations of invoking the Sybase stored procedure that returns a value in an output parameter, with no luck. After taking a break to eat dinner, I downloaded the Sybase jConnect JDBC drivers. I figure that if I have the urge to try out using JDBC to call the Sybase stored procedure, at least I'll have the JAR files necessary to do so.

More LSX fun and excitement

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 18 Mar 2004 20:00:00 -0400

I spent three hours working with the LSX connector for Sybase this evening. Essentially, the agent needs to use the LSX connector for Sybase to accomplish three general tasks:

invoke a stored procedure with one input parameter and retrieve the result as an output field
invoke a stored procedure with one input parameter and one output parameter, and retrieve result from the output parameter
insert a new record into Sybase

I got #1 and #3 to work last night. I'm stuck on #2. In a recent article in The View ("Let Your Relational Database Do the Work -- How to Invoke Stored Procedures from Domino 6 Applications"), the example showed how to invoke a DB2 stored procedure. In the example, the input parameters were added to the parmFieldList (LCFieldList) and the output parameters were retrieved from the destFieldList (LCFieldList). When tried this technique with a Sybase procedure, Sybase generated an error. It stated that I needed to define both the input parameter and output parameter as fields (LCField) in the input parmFieldList. So, I tried this instead and was able to invoke the stored procedure without generating an Error. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the value that was supposed to be stored in the output parameter. Looks like I'll be having more fun with LSX this weekend...

All workflows are not created equal

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 16 Mar 2004 17:30:00 -0400

As I continued to add an approval process to a form this afternoon, and was surprised at how many nuances there are to even a relatively simple workflow. The approval process I was adding involved having an approval matrix of up to five approvers. Only the first approver is required. The first question I had was, do I need to ensure that all of the names in the approval matrix are unique? The answer to this question ultimately comes down to whether the person adding the approver needs to know not to enter an approver twice, or if the application should prevent that from happening. My customer doesn't want me to overengineer the application, but even a simple requirements clarification like this can have a significant impact. For example, when an approver approves/rejects a document, should the underlying code only approve the first instance found for the approver, or all instances?

What's interesting is that the workflow engine I'm adding to this database has been "borrowed" from another application. In that application, each approver was guaranteed to be unique, because each approver had a specific role in the process. When it comes to requiring approval for a generic document like a Policy or a Procedure, you don't necessarily know the role of each approver involved up front. So, in the form I'm working on today, each approver name is selected from the NAB and each approver's title is manually entered. Because of this, it would be easy for the person composing the document to add the same person twice from the NAB and give that person two different titles.

Since my customer wants to get the application out as quickly as possible, I've decided to forgo adding logic that would ensure that each approver is unique. I've also left the "borrowed" essentially unchanged, meaning that an approver who is listed twice in the approval matrix will need to click on the [Approve] button twice to record both approvals. Even though I believe that the workflow logic should be changed to either ensure unique approvers or handle multiple approvals gracefully, I need to keep in mind that most customers haven't forgotten that Notes is a RAD platform, and that changes like those I've mentioned above can easily be added at a later date.

Archiving code

Michael Sobczak — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 19:00:00 -0400

I just wrapped up adding functionality to a test db that makes it possible for users to select several documents at once and change their status to one that would target them for archiving. The code itself was not complicated by any stretch of the imagination, but it got me thinking about the situation that required my customer to ask me to add it. My customer had been using their application since 1999, and its grown to about 1 gig in size. The application already has functionality (i.e. a scheduled agent) that archives documents based on status (Closed, Paid, or Cancelled), users are required to manually change the status of each document individually. This functionality would work fine if users regularly marked documents closed when the work relating to project is complete, but for some reason, very few documents are moved into either of the above status. This is probably due to the fact that when a project is done, people naturally move onto the next project instead of officially closing their previous project. I wonder how many other Notes applications there are out there that are bogged down with old documents that should have been archived a long time ago but never were?

Sametime Bot presentation

Michael Sobczak — Sun, 14 Mar 2004 16:45:00 -0400

I spent about three hours today coming up with an outline for the Sametime Bot presentation I'm supposed to give to NuTechs this coming Tuesday. I probably have more material than I need for a ten minute "teaser" presentation, but I'd rather have too much material than too little. Besides, after looking at what I came up with (seven pages, including three screen shots), I feel that I could definitely turn it into a decent article, or even a full presentation for the DNP. After what Scott Good told me how the Advisor compensates you for presenting at their conferences, I'm also thinking along those lines as well. I've never given a presentation to a large room full of people before, but I think its definitely worth a shot.

LSX experimentation

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 13 Mar 2004 17:00:00 -0400

I spent some time today working on the new version of the agent that will create records in Sybase based on Notes documents. I discovered right off the bat that in order for LSX to be able to invoke a stored procedure, you need to specify in the code the actual parameter names used by the stored procedure. So, I fired off another e-mail to my customer letting him know that I needed more information in order for my LSX agent to work. I tried using the Catalog property to find out what fields the stored procedure in question needed, but LSX doesn't have a way to interrogate a stored procedure for parameters. I was able to find out the name of the database owner, though. I'm still surprised that things I was able to do with the LSX connector for Oracle don't work with the LSX connector for Sybase. That's probably due to underlying differences in the databases, however.

First day of class went well

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 9 Mar 2004 17:30:00 -0400

Most of the time today was devoted to presentations on WebSphere Portal. One item I wasn't aware of is that WebSphere Portal Express doesn't come with the Lotus Collaboration Components. These components are what enable a portal admin or developer to incorporate Domino, Sametime, Quickplace and Discovery Server into portal. Some of the components are preconfigured portlets that provide a quick way to launch the Sametime browser client, open a QuickPlace from a list of My Places, or open a Domino view in an IFRAME. We didn't get into any coding today, but I believe there will be some of that tomorrow. At first glance, the most difficult part of portal seems to be installing it and configuring it to work with existing Domino, Sametime and Quickplace servers. Of course, writing and deploying custom portlets using the Lotus Collaboration Components is probably challenging enough, but this class won't get into that. Overall, it was good to get a debriefing on all of the portal terminology, as well as to actually work with portal for the first time.

Adaptation

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 8 Mar 2004 23:00:00 -0400

The hotel I'm staying at has free HBO, so naturally I turned it on and got caught up in the movie Adaptation. I find it very funny, but that may be because I have a Bachelor's degree in English and took a screenplay writing class. Nick Cage deserved an oscar nomination for his role. He definitely got too wrapped up in typical Hollywood dreck like Family Man, Con Air and Gone in 60 Seconds over the years. Sure, those roles were easy money and probably didn't require too much effort, but why throw away any Oscar cache on roles like that?

Finally made it!

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 8 Mar 2004 21:30:00 -0400

It took me about 4 & 1/2 hours to drive from Ann Arbor to Franklin Park, Illinois this evening. The drive itself went better than I'd expected. I only hit modest slowdowns outside of Jackson, and when approaching the toll booths on 294, but other than that, the drive went well. For dinner, I ate at a place called the Single Diggins (!) outside of Paw Paw. The country fried steak was pretty good, although just about anything you batter, deep fry and server with brown gravy would probably taste good. It felt odd to be eating in an unfamilliar restaurant with cackling locals, but I figured as long as I kept to myself I'd be all right. Well, I gotta get some sleep. The "Create a collaborative portal with WebSphere Portal - Express Plus for Multiplatforms Version 5" workshop I signed up for at the IBM SPC will start bright and early at 9:00 AM, and I want to be wide awake for it. This will be the first time I've actually worked with portal, so I don't want to not take advantage of the opportunity.

DataJunction adventures

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 8 Mar 2004 16:30:00 -0400

One of my current assignments requires me to occassionaly work with a product called DataJunction (DJ). The product is used primarily to import text files into a Notes database. Two weeks ago I discovered that one of the DJ import processes hadn't run since 11/7/03. I mentioned this to my manager who confirmed that it would be necessary to look into this problem, even though no one had brought it up in the intervening months. (He believes that users have come to accept that Notes and other applications will not work properly, or at all.) One facet of DJ that I dislike the most is that after you make your changes on your local workstation, you need to duplicate all of your work on the server where DJ runs in batch mode. After fiddling with the conversion on my workstation for a while, I could not figure out why it wasn't working. The source and target definitions seemed fine. I did get a message from the DJ Map Designer that the layout of the source text file had changed, which required that I resave the conversion. But even after doing this I couldn't get the conversion to work like I expected. When triggered manually, it would run to completion, but the log stated that no import records were processed. Very strange. All in all, I'd have to say that DJ is the least user-friendly third-party application I've ever used.

LSX testing on hold

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 4 Mar 2004 17:00:00 -0400

The PC I needed to use to test my new LSX agent doesn't have the LSX files installed on it. My customer and I downloaded the Domino Designer install program from an internal customer download site, but that program didn't install the LSX files either. A person that supports the application that uses the same Sybase tables as I'm trying to update from Notes said that the customer typically streamlines installation programs so that any non-necessary files are not included in the install. When I said that all of the LSX files together are a few hundred k, he said that that doesn't matter. A few years ago, the users he supported had problems with an application because the customer's install program didn't include all of the MDAC files needed for the application to work. The MDAC files left out of the install were extremely small. I guess I'll file this under "customers do the strangest things". I told my customer that I'd use the NotesAgent.RunOnServer() method to test the agent remotely from home over the weekend.

Abandoning LS:DO for LSX

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 4 Mar 2004 08:15:00 -0400

By chance I happened to be reading an article in the Nov/Dec '03 issue of The View, and it said that the LSX ODBC connector does not support output parameters in stored procedures. There are two different ways to use ODBC with LSX, by using the "*LSXODBC" library or by the "LSXLC" library. While I'm not sure if the above statement applies to both libraries, I figure that it makes sense to avoid any potential problems by using the LSX connector for Sybase instead.

I created a new agent last night that uses LSX objects to insert a record. As before, it worked just fine when testing it against my local MS Access db. I'm planning on testing this new agent tomorrow afternoon when I arrive at customer location #2 tomorrow afternoon. (Yep, sounds like another twelve-hour day for yours truely.) If that works fine, I can change my code around to call the stored procedures and try that out. If all goes well, I can then plan on rewriting the rest of the agent using LSX objects. One advantage of the LSX is that I wouldn't need to remove any apostrophes or double-quotes or before doing an insert.

LS:DO error messages

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 3 Mar 2004 10:45:00 -0400

My request for help to my NuTechs comrades proved to be very rewarding. The response from one in particular, Kurt Higley, helped me to realize (or remember) that when your LS:DO Lotusscript code generates an error, the LS:DO objects themselves will contain an LS:DO specific error code and error message. The LS:DO error codes and messages are much more descriptive than the general Lotusscript error messages we looking at. Here's an example of how to use the error properties from the Domino Designer Help file:

If con.GetError <> DBstsSuccess Then
    Messagebox con.GetExtendedErrorMessage,, _
    con.GetErrorMessage
    Exit Sub
  End If

Knowing this definitely would have helped when I was testing the agent on Tuesday. One problem I found in my LS:DO code was that I was referencing the a field in one table as an integer, when it actually is a string in Sybase. That was probably why I could only insert a record with one field into that table.

LS:DO testing far from optimal

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 2 Mar 2004 20:00:00 -0400

Well, my LS:DO code just didn't work as I'd expected today. I could get the insert to work, but only if that insert inserted a record with only one value. Tomorrow, I will e-mail some of my NuTechs comrads who consult for the same general customer to see if any of them have experienced the same problem as I have. The Lotusscript error that's generated whenever the result.Execute statement is executed:
720 "LS:DO- ODBC could not complete the requested operation."
is far from helpful in determining what the problem is.

Final responses from e-pro on WebSphere Practice Test review idea

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 2 Mar 2004 17:30:00 -0400

I got this back from e-pro's Acquisitions Editor:

I did just speak to Libby, and we're not currently doing product reviews at this time. Thank you again for thinking of us, and please do think of us in the future if you have any interesting article ideas.

Initial response from e-pro on WebSphere Practice Test review idea

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 2 Mar 2004 14:45:00 -0400

I heard back from e-pro's Acquisitions Editor by e-mail:

We recently lost our Acquisitions Coordinator/Assistant and have been full-out trying to pick up the extra duties. I do apologize for not getting back to you in a more timely fashion. Please give me an opportunity to run your idea by our technical editing staff and get their feedback. I will be in touch with you once I hear back. Thank you for your patience.

LS:DO code finished

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 17:30:00 -0400

I finally finished the Lotusscript agent that will insert data into Sybase using LS:DO. I created three new subroutines that individually would handle inserting a new record into a Sybase table. To get around the problem LS:DO has with inserting a column value that contained an apostrophe (a.k.a. a single-quote), I located the following function in another application I'd supported a few years ago and added it to my "Utilities" script library:

Function ReplaceStringRoutine(mystr As String, oldstr As String, newstr As String) As String
     ' This routine replaces one substring with another
	
	Dim found As Integer
	Dim privatestr As String
	
	privatestr = mystr
	found = Instr(1, privatestr, oldstr, 1) 
	
	While (found > 0) 
          ' Change an instance of oldString, then look for more
		privatestr = Left$(privatestr, (found - 1)) + newstr + Mid$(privatestr, found + Len(oldstr))
		found = Instr(found + Len(newstr), privatestr, oldstr, 1) 
	Wend
	
     ' Returning the new string changed
	ReplaceStringRoutine = privatestr
End Function

I then changed the statement that replaces a LS:DO parameter with a value that possibly will contain an apostrophe so that it invokes the above function, like so:

'-- Remove any apostrophes in the description.  If they are present the insert fails.
desc = ReplaceStringRoutine ( Left ( doc.Description (0), 40 ), "'", "")
Call result.SetParameter ( 24, "'" & desc & "'" )

To verify that the agent is working correctly, I tested it against a local MS Access db that uses the same table names and column names as those used in the actual Sybase database. Everything worked famously on my laptop, so I figured it was time to let my customer know that the agent is ready for testing using his development Sybase database.
I e-mailed my customer that I can stop by his location to test the agent this Tuesday at around 2:30 PM. Because I'm scheduled to work at another customer site that day, I'll need to start work there at around 7:00 AM in order to get at least seven hours in before I leave. I'm not sure how long I will be at my second customer site testing the LS:DO code, so I asked my wife to keep a lite on for me. Hopefully, everything will work perfectly the first time out. (That would be a first!)

Create a Collaborative Portal with WebSphere Portal-Express Plus for Multiplatforms confirmation received

Mike Sobczak — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 12:30:00 -0400

I'll be heading to Chicago on 3/8 for two days of training at the SPC center there. Hopefully I don't get lost on this little trip. The training itself is free. I actually didn't think I was going to go, as I didn't hear back from IBM on 2/24, two weeks before the course. Now I get to make hotel reservations and get my sextant ready for the trip. It should be exciting. I hope the course helps me get more into the WebSphere Portal/Lotus Workplace side of the business. Not that Notes/Domino is going anywhere, mind you, but I'd feel more confident in my career longetivity if my skills were more in-step with IBM's long range plan.

Never throw anything away

Mike Sobczak — Thu, 26 Feb 2004 09:00:00 -0400

At least not any Notes applications you've ever worked with. One of my current customers wanted a database to store employee manuals electronically and kept referring to a set of Policies & Procedures dbs I had customized for him several years. These dbs were developed back in the V3 days. Fortunately, I'd saved a copy of all QS9000 dbs I'd worked on from 96-97, including the two mentioned above. I brought those dbs to work, where my customer was able to review the old apps and easily determine what was needed for the new on line manual db. I couldn't copy/paste anything from the old dbs, as they were originally developed by another company that is still in existance today. However, having the old dbs as a point of reference in our requirements discussions really helped.

Following up with e-pro (again)

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 17:30:00 -0400

I still hadn't received word from MaryAnn Ratchford on my idea for reviewing the CertFX WebSphere Practice Tests for e-pro, so I sent an e-mail to her and also left her a voice-mail. I normally wouldn't be such a pest, but I don't want this opportunity to have another WebSphere-related article published.

WSAD 5.1 and SQL Server

Mike Sobczak — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 14:45:59 -0400

I'd read in the Programming Guide how WSAD supports databases other than DB2, like Oracle and SQL Server. When I tried creating a connection to a SQL Server db, the connection wizard needed to know where the JDBC Jar file was located. So, I guess while WSAD supports other non-IBM databases, you still need to provide your own JDBC file.

The pitfalls of IBM Electronic Distribution

Mike Sobczak — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 12:00:00 -0400

After running all 17 install files that make up WSAD 5.1, I found out that I had mistakenly downloaded the wrong files in two instances. What's nice is that the WASD installer program doesn't really tell you this in easy to understand terms. Fortunately, I had my 5.0 install CDs with me and I could see that the IBMWSAppDev-5.1-0 directory didn't have nearly as many files as it should have. After spending some time going through the ESD pages for each of the 17 WSAD 5.1 install files, I discovered which files I had downloaded incorrectly. I can't figure out why IBM wouldn't make it easier for Business Partners to download the latest version of their products. Why not a link that would directly take you to a single page where you can download all of the install files?

Remove all apostrophes, with extreme prejudice

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 23 Feb 2004 14:15:00 -0400

My customer responded to my question on how to handle inserting text values that contain apostrophes. As I mentioned in a previous post, LS:DO does not like apostrophes. He said that the quickest solution would be to simply remove the apostrophes. This solution was employed in another application that he supports, so he's comfortable with my employing the same solution for the application I'm currently developing for him.

Finally finished Chapter 6 in the WSAD Programming Guide

Mike Sobczak — Sun, 22 Feb 2004 16:00:00 -0400

The materials on the Data perspective elements was kinda neat. I regret not studying this material last summer. Its interesting how you first need to create a connection to the RDBMS in the DB Servers view, then import the connection into a Simple Project before you can use the connection in code. I'm hoping to get the chance to use the WSAD data functionality at a few of my other client locations, where SQL Server and Oracle are used.

Son's cold is back...

Mike Sobczak — Sun, 22 Feb 2004 07:45:00 -0400

with a vengence. He had a pretty rough night last night. He woke up repeatedly throughout the night, and would cough so hard that he started crying. I'm hoping that what other people have said to me turns out to be true, that if he gets sick when he's younger, he'll hardly ever get sick after he turns five. We'll see.

Statistics and Events

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 20 Feb 2004 12:15:00 -0400

I just happened to be looking in the Notes Log this morning, and noticed that one scheduled agent had stopped running with this message:

Agent 'RunReferralExport' in 'tsm_apps\newrn.nsf' did not process all documents successfully. Check the Agent Log for more information: Document has been deleted

Because this agent stopped running due to a problem detected by the Agent Manager, I realized that I needed to set up Statistics and Events on the server where this agent was running. I'd dealt with a similar problem to this a few years ago, where an agent was timing out and nobody new about it unless they noticed it in the Notes Log. All I needed to do was configuring a Custom Monitor in the Statistics & Events db (events4.nsf), and then ask the Notes admin to load the Collect and Event tasks. Now, everyone responsible for monitoring the performance of the production Notes applications--the Notes Admin, the CIO and myself, will recieve an e-mail whenever a scheduled production agent fails under similar circumstances. I wonder if Statistics & Events has been improved/simplified in V6? I've only used this admin feature with R5 so far...

All Domino Blogs are not created equal

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 19 Feb 2004 10:00:00 -0400

The reason why I started this blog was to review the three Domino Blog templates currently available. The template used for this blog is the DomBlog template created by Jake Howlett of codestore.net. I've been trying to evaluate the ProjectDX DominoBlog template, but haven't had much success yet. First of all, the design of the template is hidden, so its difficult to understand how it works from a programming standpoint. I tried unhiding the design by using the CCI tool from Casettica, but all of the formula and Lotusscript code remained hidden afterwards. I tried e-mailing a question to the DominoBlog e-mail address, but have not heard back from anyone after several weeks. I guess that goes to show you that when you want to work with an open source solution, be prepared for minimal documentation and minimal support.

DDL and XML Schemas

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 19:45:00 -0400

Spent some time this evening learning how to generate DDL and XML Schemas using WSAD. I'd heard about DDL before, but never really understood what it was. WSAD has some nice features that help you generate both. But like most things in WSAD, you need to do your homework before you go clicking around.

More on Use Cases

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 18 Feb 2004 16:15:00 -0400

I spent some time today taking the notes I had from interviews with customers and putting them into Use Case format. One advantage to documenting new or existing system behavior as Use Cases is it forces you to think in terms of what causes a user to do something with a system, and what is the expected output. Most of my notes did an excellent job of capturing the screens, queries and reports that the customers were using, and what is the purpose behind what they use them (expected outcome), and what causes (triggers) them to use them. I think this experience will be very benificial to me going forward, as I will be able to function more on the requirements phase of a project, and not exclusively on the design, development and implementation phases.

@RegQueryValue saves the day

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 17 Feb 2004 13:15:00 -0400

Some Lotusscript code I wrote that accesses Oracle via the LC LSX wouldn't work for a user with Oracle 7 installed. This user couldn't be upgraded to an Oracle 8 client due to a need to be able to access a system requiring the older client. Fortunately, I'd heard about the @RegQueryValue function. I created a function in a script library that returns the version of Oracle installed like so:

Function getOracleLSX () As String
	
	Dim oracleVer As Variant
	
	oracleVer = Evaluate ( |@RegQueryValue ( "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE"; "SOFTWARE\\ORACLE"; "ORACLE_GROUP_NAME" )| )
	Print "Oracle version: " & oracleVer (0)
	
	If ( oracleVer (0) = "Oracle for Windows 95" ) Then
		getOracleLSX = "Oracle"
	Else
		getOracleLSX = "Oracle8"
	End If
	
End Function

I then use the value returned by this function in the statement that creates the LCConnection:

Set connect = New LCConnection ( getOracleLSX () )

Simple, no?

WSAD Studying

NuTechs — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 19:45:00 -0400

Since its been a little while since I've needed to use WSAD to do Java or Java Web App development, I've been going through the WebSphere Studio Application Developer Version 5 Programming Guide (sg246957.pdf). This guide is actually very well written. I read most of this material before last summer while I was prepping for IBM Test 285: Developing With IBM Websphere Studio, V5.0. Now that I'm officially an IBM Certified Associate Developer for WebSphere Studio V5.0, why am I going over material I've already read? Most of this material applies to Test 286: Application Development with IBM WebSphere Studio, V5.0, which I'm also interested in taking. This guide covers deploying Java web apps to a Java Web Server, something I'm intent on learning as other people will be able to see what I can do. A good friend of mine who works for IBM recommended that I get up to speed on Struts, and this guide covers developing Struts applications using WSAD.

Use Cases

NuTechs — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 17:00:00 -0400

One of my clients has asked me to document the result of interviews I have with users of an old Paradox system as Use Cases. I'd heard about Use Cases before, but hadn't actually had a need to document the requirements I receive in that format yet. Most of the projects I find myself on don't have the time for spending a lot of time documenting requirements. I suppose that's a result of my doing a lot of Notes/Domino programming. Customers expect a fully-functional, collaborative application in a short period of time, and don't want to spend part of that time on documentation. In any event, I used Google to find some articles on Use Cases, and found it to be a fairly straightforward documentation framework. I had to steer clear of the articles that devolved into diagrams with circles and stick-figures, most of which involved UML and Rational Rose. IBM's DeveloperWorks site does have a plethora of articles on Use Cases, though, and I'm going to try to get through as many of them as I can. Funny thing is, I can already see myself developing a quick Notes database with one Use Case form and a couple of views. Putting this sort of documentation in Word documents seems like a waste of time, as Windows Explorer just doesn't allow for Notes view capabilities.

LS:DO, parameters and apostrophes

Michael Sobczak — Sun, 15 Feb 2004 13:00:00 -0400

I hit a minor snag with the code I'm writing that will insert records into Sybase based on Notes documents. Currently, I'm developing a Lotusscript agent that uses LS:DO to update a local database via ODBC. This code should work the same whether it is updating a MS Access db or a Sybase db. The problem I've found occurs when I try to insert a record where a text field includes a single-quote. Because of the way that LS:DO works, all parameter values added to a SQL statement must be enclosed in single-quotes:

'This is a full description'

If the Description contains a single-quote like the following, the SQL Insert fails:

'That's the way it goes.'

There are several options here:

Remove any single-quotes from the text field when the Notes document is saved. I can continue to develop the agent using Lotusscript and LS:DO. There is the possibility that single-quotes could appear in other text fields, and these instances would need to be handled in a similar way.
Update the tables using LC LSX instead of LS:DO. I've used LC LSX to retrieve data from RDBMS databases, but not to update a database. I could continue to develop the agent in Lotusscript, but would need additional time to research how to construct the Insert statements.
Change the agent to a Java agent and use JDBC to update Sybase. JDBC handles text data with single-quotes better, and I have used it to retrieve and update data in DB2 and Oracle. I would need to rewrite the code I've written so far, but since I'm only at the initial step in the Sybase update process (insert a new record into the first of four tables), there isn't a lot of code that I'd need to rewrite.

Son is finally feeling better

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 14 Feb 2004 12:36:11 -0400

My son came down with a nasty case of the flu on Tuesday. He spent several days afterwards eating next to nothing and vomiting whatever he did eat. The vomiting stopped yesterday, and he has been eating more. The flu is really tough on my son, who's underweight as it is. To loose several pounds is not a good thing. Hopefully, we can get him back on the Krispy Kreme diet plan soon!

Excel to Notes

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 16:30:00 -0400

I guess today turned into Notes/Office integration day. I had to import an Excel spreadsheet into a Notes db. I couldn't do the view import as the columns in the spreadsheet didn't correspond to fields in the target form. So, I created a Lotusscript to handle the import. It sure helps to have Lotusscript code on hand that works with Excel objects. It definitely saves time over searching through the LDD forums or Google for an answer.

Notes <-> Office integration made simple

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 14:00:34 -0400

I had to modify some Lotusscript code today so that it would be able to detach and open a Word file. It already opened an Excel file, but could not handle Word files. I wonder if I do what everybody does: record a macro, edit the macro, then use the Object Browser to figure out what parameter is required and what not. I have to admit, Microsoft makes doing VBA coding pretty simple.

Next DNP meeting moved to 4/4/2004

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 16:30:00 -0400

The original 3/10/2004 meeting date wasn't going to work for one of the speakers, Ray Bylik of Data Planners. He's going to give a presentation that covers installing and running Domino on Linux. I believe that this will be a very interesting topic for many people, so I felt that changing the meeting date was appropriate. Joe Wichowski of eBiz will still be covering the openntf.org mail template, and I will be covering the three Notes blog templates.

Spoke with Janis...

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 15:45:00 -0400

I had heard from John, another former Superiorite, that Janice was going to pick a place and time when all of us who used to work for the ITS group could get together. Janis said that she sent an e-mail out to everyone (not including me, natch), and didn't get any feedback. I said that since I'm in Ann Arbor Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, that Tuesdays and Thursdays would work best for me. She let me know that Joni Upton, who used to manage the Superior help desk, has moved to Colorado. I let Janis know that I have Vijaya's (VJ) e-mail address somewhere, and that I'd forward it along.

"Fun" with LC LSX and LS:DO

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 20:15:00 -0400

I spent some time trying to figure out how to use the LC LSX classes to insert a new record into a table, with no luck. If you haven't tried using the LC LSX classes, then you don't know how poor the help files are for these classes. The best way to figure out how to use them is to have someone else who's figured them out send you some sample code. The samples in the help can make you confused real quick, as most of them relate to using LEI as a source for your connections.
I then spent time using good-old LS:DO to do the insert. The last time I'd inserted records into a RDBMS from within Domino involved Java servlets and JDBC. Compared to JDBC, LS:DO seems remarkably awkward. For example, to insert records using JDBC, you use this syntax:

final String insertDetailLinesString = "insert into DRAFTLINES values ( ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ? )";
...
orderStmt = con.prepareStatement ( insertDetailLinesString );
orderStmt.setString ( 1, doc.getUniversalID() );  // NOTEID
orderStmt.setInt ( 6, 0 );  // QTY
orderStmt.setInt ( 7, 0 );  // LISTPRC
...
orderStmt.executeUpdate ();

Using LS:DO, you would do something like this:

qry.SQL = "INSERT INTO INCIDENT ( FLDREC_NUM, FLDMODDATE, FLDINCNUM, ) VALUES ( ?newRecNum?, ?GetDate?, ?newIncNum?)
Call result.SetParameter ( "newRecNum", "'" & Cstr ( nextNum ) & "'" )
Call result.SetParameter ( "GetDate", "'" & Cstr ( Now ) & "'" )
Call result.SetParameter ( "newIncNum", "'" & doc.Plant (0) + "1" & "'" )

Notice that with Java, you can insert data type you want into the PreparedStatement. In LS:DO, you can only insert Strings. Also, JDBC is perfectly OK with using just a single ? to represent a parameter. In LS:DO, you need to put a parameter name between two ?s. Yuck. I wonder how LS:DO handles parameters that have single-quotes or double-quotes? In all honesty, I probably would have went with JDBC if I thought that the people who would have to support this could could do Java programming. Maybe I should just go with JDBC and let them know after the fact. Hmm...

Superior Principles

Michael Sobczak — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 15:56:00 -0400

In honor of Brian O'Curran joining NuTechs, I'm posting the Superior Principles that he and I used to live by:

Invest in Our People
Open Communication
Reward Sharing
No Politics
Don't Barf on the Client Site
Speed, Nimbleness, Flexibility
Teamwork
Be Ready for the Next Assignment
Don't Assume -- Nag!
Keep the Client's Interests First
Balance the Three Constituencies: Client, Consultant and Company
Follow Efficient Processes and Record Keeping
Attention to Detail
Confidentiality
Hire the Highest Quality People

Finally got ScanToNotes to put a PDF file into a Notes RTF

Michael Sobczak — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 11:00:00 -0400

This third-party application seemed to work fine, until I told it to attach the scanned image as a PDF file. The support rep fromThe Imaging Group told me that based on the log files the product creates, the DLL used to create PDFs wasn't included in the file I downloaded. He sent me a URL to a direct download page, and I downloaded the trial version of the software again. The size of the download seemed to be the same (5 mg) as before. I uninstalled the product and installed it using the latest download, and it worked fine. Its kind of pricey ($300 per user), but it does work seamlessly with the Notes client. That says a lot as the Notes client sometimes doesn't work seamlessly with itself.

Was able to add a table to a Rich Text Field using the new Notes 6 objects

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 9 Feb 2004 20:00:00 -0400

The LDD article I referenced previously by the DeJeans was a big help. Now that I have this code running in one application, I imagine that the next time I need to do something like this, I can copy/paste like usual. I'm glad I wasn't tested on the new NotesRichText objects when I took the V6 upgrade exam. I never would have been able to remember all of the NotesRichTextNavigator properties & methods. (Those of you who took the Lotusscript cert exam know what I'm talking about.)

Checking for duplicates

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 9 Feb 2004 14:50:12 -0400

I spent more time than I expected trying to determine unique and duplicate documents in a Notes database. I'm sure that there someone has already written code that is available on the internet to do this, but sometimes you just want to write the stuff yourself. The code I wrote put the unique docs into one folder and the duplicates (both of them) into another folder. There were 6,000 documents for the agent go cycle through, but I never thought that it would take the agent over an hour to complete. It must have taken so long because the database itself is huge (500+ mg), and because the agent needed to update each folder's index every time a duplicate or non-duplicate was found. I'd also forgotten that when you're checking the previous document to the next document, the next document will look like its unique, until it becomes the previous document. Word to the wise, test your agent out on a small set (50 or so) of the documents first, not the entire 6,000. Even if you're convinced that your code is flawless and should work perfectly the first time, or second time, or third time, think small.

Brian O'Curran...come on down!!!

Michael Sobczak — Mon, 9 Feb 2004 10:30:00 -0400

Brian O'Curran, technical sales guy from Lotus Software, just started working for NuTechs today. I've known Brian for years, and am glad to have him on board. Brian and I first met back in '98 after I just started working for Superior Consultant. I was talking with Janice, a co-worker of mine in the ITS group, and Brian walked up and joked around with us for a bit. I believe he and Janice worked at Kelly Services together for a while. Brian probably doesn't remember this, but my first "exposure" to him was a form letter he sent me back in '96 asking me to call him about opportunities for Notes developers at Unitive. As some (few?) of you will remember, Unitive was the name of the groupware unit under Superior Consultant. Unitive was renamed "Enterprise Consulting", and won the Best Business Impact for the SCORE project for Chrysler. After that point...Superior Consultant decided to go Microsoft and everything went downhill from there. Enterprise Consulting was brought into the Superior Consultant fold, and effectively stopped consulting in Notes and focused on something called "ActiveX for HealthCare". Needless to say, that effort proved to be vaporware, and caused major layoffs at Superior. Since that time, Brian has given six presentations to the Detroit Notes Professionals, all of them well attended and well received. So, without further ado, welcome Brian!

Replaced the default DomBlog logo...

Michael Sobczak — Sun, 8 Feb 2004 16:04:06 -0400

with one that matches the blog's name. I "borrowed" a bit from the Punk'd homepage on MTV's website. I can hear the copyright police from Viacom heading over with sirens blaring right now...

A Test

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 7 Feb 2004 10:33:00 -0400

This is only a test. Had this been an actual blog entry, you would be enthralled by the extreme intelligence of the blogger, and posted a comment stating such immediately.

New Lotusscript Notes Rich Text classes - bizzare by design?

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 7 Feb 2004 09:30:00 -0400

I'm thoroughly convinced that the functionality of the new NotesRichTextTable class is geared towards someone who has no experience with HTML, XML, or DOM. How can you explain having to calculate the next cell to insert data into by determining the total numbers of rows and columns? With V6's nifty new Lotusscript DOM parsers, you'd think that Lotus would go that route. Instead, developers are left learning a programming technique that has no relation to coding done outside of Notes. (LC LSX is another good example of this.) Oh well...Enough griping. I'm sure Lotus will tell me, "but developers like you have been asking for this capability forever!" That's true, but not like this. Not after I've accessed Notes document and design elements via DXL. I'd better keep my mouth shut, otherwise IBM will decide to take this functionality away because it doesn't fit with the long term plan or something. Thankfully, Sally Blanning DeJean and David DeJean have written an excellent article on LDD that covers how to work with rich text tables. I'll use their code as a boilerplate for what I'm doing.

Staying home again

Michael Sobczak — Sat, 7 Feb 2004 07:30:00 -0400

Actually felt worse today than yesterday. I don't feel like I've slept well at all this whole week. Of course, I've been sleeping on the couch so that my coughing and nose-blowing won't wake up my son or my wife. All of the "non-drowsy" medication I've been taking has been doing an excellent job of keeping me from getting drowsy enough to sleep. Even NyQuil seems to be keeping me up. I suspect Vicks doesn't put as much alcohol in the softgel version as the regular liquid.

Document command is not available - solved?

Michael Sobczak — Fri, 6 Feb 2004 17:00:00 -0400

After reviewing the Agent Log entries being created by my custom logging code, I've determined that the problem users are experiencing are due to this Lotusscript code sequence:

uidoc.Save
uidoc.EditMode = False

Checking the LDD 4.5/R5 forum confirmed that this has caused a problem for developers in the past. Now I have to ask my customer whether this functionality is really necessary. I'm in favor of just closing the document, but I also know that users who have worked with a Notes client app for a long time quickly notice when something they've grown accustomed to is removed, and just as quickly ask for it to be reinstated.

Sybase update requirements finalized

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 5 Feb 2004 10:00:00 -0400

I just received answers to the remaining requirements clarification questions I had on how to update a Sybase so that it reflects data being entered into a Notes application. I'm planning on developing the Lotusscript agent that will insert records into several Sybase tables next week. This agent will need to do the following:

insert a new record into Sybase
invoke a stored procedure with one input parameter and retrieve the result as an output field
invoke a stored procedure with one input parameter and one output parameter, and retrieve result from the output parameter

To ensure that my customer will be able to support this agent after I've delivered the finished application, I'm planning on using LS:DO. I haven't worked with LS:DO in a while (several years?), but I figure that using the LS:DO objects (ODBCConnection, ODBCQuery and ODBCResultSet) should be relatively straightforward.

Decided to call in sick today

Michael Sobczak — Thu, 5 Feb 2004 08:00:00 -0400

What started out as a severe case of the shudders on Monday afternoon has gotten much worse. My throat feels like I've been swallowing fiberglass for a week. Sinuses are clogged too. I wonder if this particular cold is "goin' around", as they say. I believe my son caught it first and passed it on to my wife and I. (Sure, blame it on the three year-old...)