Posts Tagged ‘notes’

23 Apr 2013
4

TIP: What to try if IBM Notes 9 keeps crashing on Apple OSX

Here’s a quick tip for those who experience continuous crashing of IBM Notes 9 on OSX Mountain Lion.

Before installing IBM Notes 9 Beta on my MacBook Pro, I had Lotus Notes 8.5.3 running. I ran the IBM Notes 9 Beta install without uninstalling Notes 8.5.3. Every time I opened IBM Notes for the first time since starting my machine, it would crash and return an error report. Notes would only successfully open after 2-3 attempts. This happened both with the Beta as well as the official release of Notes 9.

What i decided to try next is completely uninstall Notes before installing a fresh copy. This was very tricky because Notes leaves files in multiple places after an uninstall. The below link will assist you with a complete uninstall.

Click here to see the article: “Uninstalling Notes from a Mac OS X client”

Even after uninstalling and re-installing a fresh copy, the same problem occurred. I checked with the online community and they weren’t getting the same problem. Thankfully, my final attempt worked:

SOLUTION

- I uninstalled IBM Notes 9 completely referencing the above link.
- During the new install of IBM Notes 9, I deselected all add-ons except for Social Edition. (I think the IBM Connections add-on was causing the issue)

That’s it. I don’t want to blame IBM Connections for crashing my app, but once removing it, everything worked 100%. It might be that I had IBM Connections installed, but not configured. Who knows.

I hope this helps.

Cheers for now
John

IBM, IBM Notes/Domino , , , ,
14 Mar 2013
0

Video Tutorial: Get up and running with Lotus Domino Designer 8.5.3

Hi everyone. So here’s my next Video Tutorial. I show you how to download Lotus Domino Designer 8.5.3 and I also give a quick demo on how to set up your first Notes Application.

I decided to go back to basics and assist those who are new to IBM (Lotus) Notes, especially those who want to get started on Notes/Domino and XPages Development. I end off the Video Tutorial showing you how easy it is to create a working CRUD Application (Create/Read/Update/Delete) in the Notes Client.

If you use iTunes, you can download this video via David Leedy’s NotesIn9 Podcast series.

Enjoy :)

John.

IBM, IBM Notes/Domino, Lotus Notes, Lotus Notes Client, Tutorials, Videos , , , , , , , , ,
21 Nov 2012
3

Check the Eclipse version of your Lotus Notes 8 Client

Hi everyone. Just thought I’d blog this quickly. I wanted to check which version of Eclipse is being used for my Notes 8.5.3 FP1 Client and it was a touch tricker than expected. Thanks to Nathan T Freeman, I now know where to find this:

1. Open your Notes Client and click on “HelpAbout”.

2. Click on the “Plug-in Details” button.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Sort the “Plug-in Name” Column and search for “Eclipse UI”. You will see the version in the Version Column. In my case it’s version 3.4.2……

 

 

This is baseline for determining the overall version of Eclipse that’s used for Lotus Notes.

 

Hope this helps.

Cheers.

Eclipse, Lotus Notes Client , , , ,
1 Nov 2012
28

Notes Classic vs Notes for Eclipse. A glass case of emotions

The past few days I’ve been involved with quite a lot of Std Notes Development. Waking up this morning I realized that working in Notes 8 Eclipse, as awesome as what it is for many reasons related to XPages, has come at some cost. I’ve been working on a Project that required no XPages Development, and decided to run Notes 8 Classic just to get a feel for it. In doing so, i’ve identified the following that makes me frown daily:

1. The Speed

DDE (Domino Designer in Eclipse) is quite a bit slower than Designer 8 Classic or prior releases. Every time I open DDE for the first time I go make myself some coffee so that it can finish up whatever it’s trying to do. DDE is also less responsive to what i’m used to in prior releases of Notes. Every time i click on something there’s this delay before it reacts.

2. The Build

Ok, this is probably the bane of my existence. How I miss the days of “Modify, Save, Preview”. Now, it’s “Modify/Save/Build/Preview/Hmm, it must have not built properly/Build again/Preview/Dammit, now what!!!/Clean/Build/Preview/Finally! I’m all for XPages but there’s got to be a better way. It’s gotten worse lately where if I have a Local Replica where I design all my changes, then build and replicate with the Server, 60% of the time I have to open the Replica on the Server and re-build, which sometimes takes up to 3 minutes depending on size, etc. This has given me massive amounts of frustration and unnecessary time wasted.

3. The Crashes

It almost feels like DDE is in a bad mood by default, until you can somehow convince it otherwise. I had to install Subversion in DDE on multiple machines the other day. 5 out of the 6 machines resulted in their DDEs crashing and none of them for the same reason. I couldn’t believe my luck. 5 out of 6. Is this the cost of having functionality like XPages, Source Control, etc?

 

I apologize that this is not one of my more positive Blog Posts, but I realized this week what a joy it was to work in Classic Domino Designer. Yes, sure Eclipse brings a lot to the table, but most definitely not for free.

I’d love to hear feedback from everyone on their experiences. Maybe this post could result in finding a way to have DDE Perform the way we all want it to.

 

Cheers

John.

Lotus Notes, XPages , , , , ,
21 Sep 2012
3

LotusScript Tip: Set Readers and Authors Fields in new Documents

Hi Everyone. I’ve been using this forever but I noticed recently that it’s not really common knowledge.

Let’s say you have a Form Design and in it you have a Readers and Authors field. Now let’s also say that you create NotesDocuments for this Form Design in the back-end. The question is: How do you populate a field in LotusScript and turn that field into a READERS or AUTHORS if required.

Many use a famous trick called “ComputeWithForm” which is a method that belongs to the NotesDocument Object. In simple terms, a ComputeWithForm will evaluate the entire NotesDocument against the Form Design it’s associated with….i.e. If you have a Form with 50 Computed Fields that contain various @Formulas, a ComputeWithForm will evaluate each of those Formulas for your NotesDocument Object.

e.g.

‘ VARIABLES
Dim ss as New NotesSession
Dim db as NotesDatabase
Dim doc as NotesDocument
 
‘ CODE
Set db = ss.CurrentDatabase
Set doc = db.CreateDocument
 
Call doc.ReplaceItemValue( “Form”, “FormAliasName” )
Call doc.ComputeWithForm( False )
Call doc.Save( True, True )

 

While this can do the job and save you a lot of coding, a ComputeWithForm can make your code terribly slow depending on how many fields and Computed Values are in the Form and how many documents you plan on computing. I’ve seen a ComputeWithForm take 2 seconds to evaluate 1 NotesDocument. In that time your code could’ve achieved the same goal and a lot more if you wrote your code to not use it. Anyways, moving on.

 

If you didn’t use ComputeWithForm, you would land up having an issue with Readers and Author Fields in your NotesDocument:

e.g.

‘ VARIABLES
Dim ss as New NotesSession
Dim db as NotesDatabase
Dim doc as NotesDocument
 
‘ CODE
Set db = ss.CurrentDatabase
Set doc = db.CreateDocument
 
Call doc.ReplaceItemValue( “Form”, “FormAliasName” )
Call doc.ReplaceItemValue( “CurrentReaders”, “John Jardin/Ukuvuma” )
Call doc.ReplaceItemValue( “CurrentAuthors”, “John Jardin/Ukuvuma” )
Call doc.Save( True, True )

 

If you had to open the DocumentProperties for this Saved NotesDocument and in the Field Properties Tab click on CurrentReaders, you will see it’s a Normal Text Field. This can cause massive issues from an Access point of view.

To solve this problem, we turn to our ever faithful friend…….NotesItem. Using the NotesItem Object, you can set the Field Type in your code. See below Examples 1 and 2:

e.g.

‘ VARIABLES
Dim ss as New NotesSession
Dim db as NotesDatabase
Dim doc as NotesDocument
Dim item as NotesItem
 
‘ CODE
Set db = ss.CurrentDatabase
Set doc = db.CreateDocument
 
Call doc.ReplaceItemValue( “Form”, “FormAliasName” )
 
Example 1
 
Call doc.ReplaceItemValue( “CurrentReaders”, “John Jardin/Ukuvuma” )
Call doc.ReplaceItemValue( “CurrentAuthors”, “John Jardin/Ukuvuma” )
Call doc.ReplaceItemValue( “CreatedBy”, “John Jardin/Ukuvuma” )
 
Set item = doc.GetFirstItem(“CurrentReaders”)
item.Isreaders = True
 
Set item = doc.GetFirstItem(“CurrentAuthors”)
item.Isauthors = True
 
Set item = doc.GetFirstItem(“CreatedBy”)
item.Isnames = True
 
Example 2 – (Preferred Option)
 
Set item = New NotesItem( doc, “CurrentReaders”, “John Jardin/Ukuvuma”, READERS )
Set item = New NotesItem( doc, “CurrentAuthors”, “John Jardin/Ukuvuma”, AUTHORS )
Set item = New NotesItem( doc, “CreatedBy”, “John Jardin/Ukuvuma”, NAMES )
 

Also, so you know, SSJS for XPages also has a NotesItem Object that you can use similar to what we’ve done here. I’m not sure about Example 2 though.

Until next time, happy coding

John.

LotusScript , , , ,
12
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