And another new feature from the MindPlan labs, also brought to you by "Mr. C and JNI" Tammo Riedinger :-)  :
There is a new "Replicate and refresh" function in the "Extras" menu:

When you click on that new menu entry, you will see a server selection dialog. The dialog contains all the servers that you used in previous replications (it gets them from the database's replication history). The last replication server is preselected:
We then replicate the database with the selected Domino server. The replication can be aborted and you can see a replication progress bar.
Support for abortion and the progress bar is something that you cannot achieve using the normal Notes Java API. But with a little help from the C API, it works like a charm. :-)

Karsten Lehmann | June 25th, 2009 13:09:09 | Comments (0) | Permanent Link

One new feature from the proof-of-concept work that we're currently doing in the "MindPlan labs":
Our latest MindPlan developer build contains a function to retrieve the formatted richtext of MindPlan nodes, including picture and table support. My developer colleague "Mr. C and JNI" Tammo Riedinger made that possible by leveraging functions from the Lotus Notes C API. They convert the Notes richtext to HTML (like the Domino webserver does) that we can display in the application:

We're still searching for the right place for such a panel. An alternative location might be a new property dialog tab.

Please note, that this is a read-only panel. It's still necessary to switch to Lotus Notes to edit the richtext.

Karsten Lehmann | June 25th, 2009 12:29:39 | Comments (0) | Permanent Link

The next MindPlan version will contain a few new features in the analysis view area of the product.
The most relevant thing is support for AND/OR in the filter selection of an analysis view:

In previous versions, all the filters in the list were automatically concatenated with an AND operation.
Now you have the choice between AND, OR, NOT AND and NOT OR. To build all possible expressions, the filter list is a tree from now on. If you only add one filter to the list, you won't see the difference. But after adding another filter, both appear indented below an AND node.
(For hardcore users: AND/OR can also be nested, there's no limit in depth)

There are also four new filters in the current developer build:

• resource (company)
• resource (department)
• resource (role)
• resource (group)

With them, you can filter out activities for parts of your organizational structure (defined in the MindPlan configuration database).

On the categorization page, the list of categories has become quiet large and confusing over the years. Many customers asked for some kind of sorting in the list.
So this is how the new list looks like:
In addition to those dialog changes, we also added a refresh functionality to the analysis views. They now check for new data when you press F9, like it's done for normal maps. No need to close/reopen them any more.

Karsten Lehmann | May 7th, 2009 13:46:15 | Comments (4) | Permanent Link

Long time no see ;-)

We had an interesting support call today. It was about a slowly running MindPlan application. *Very* slow startup time and map handling.
The cause was an old Windows XP installation (SP1 instead of SP2 oder SP3). Upgrading to a more recent SP solved it...

...and it also reduced the risk that your PC might get hacked :-)

In this case, the machine was a virtual machine inside VMWare on Mac OS X, but maybe it's a general issue.

Karsten Lehmann | March 6th, 2009 19:25:25 | Comments (0) | Permanent Link

Finally we finished the examples to our Lotusphere presentation.
Here you can download the presentation itself (our part of the presentation), a document with links to further information as well as the Eclipse (3.4) workspace with the sample sources.

The samples show different levels of integration of a legacy Swing application into the Lotus Notes 8 Standard client.

• Presentation slides for session AD303 (2nd half)
• Eclipse Development Resources
• Workspace with sample code

Standalone legacy Swing application: Multiple views with menubar and toolbar



Basic integration:
One tab containing the complete legacy application with Swing menubar and toolbar



Advanced integration:
One tab containing the content pane of the legacy application.
Menubars and toolbars dynamic contributions to the Lotus Notes Standard client UI

Karsten Lehmann | February 9th, 2009 15:27:46 | Comments (0) | Permanent Link

I spent some time to manually grab all the PDF download links from the Lotusphere website and I'm currently downloading the available slides with a download manager:



Here are instructions, how you can also do that.

Karsten Lehmann | January 24th, 2009 18:54:10 | Comments (10) | Permanent Link

The session is today at 1:30 pm in the Swan Mockingbird room:

AD303: Leveraging 3rd Party Components in IBM Lotus Notes Composite Applications


The demos and list of web resources will be here in the blog in about a week. We still need to do some polishing and documentation.

Just watch this blog by subscribing to the RSS feed.

Karsten Lehmann | January 20th, 2009 15:10:46 | Comments (0) | Permanent Link

Our Notes 8.5 problems, described in the last blog posting, with

NotesUIWorkspace.IsInCompositeApp
and
NotesUIWorkspace.GetComponentViewPreference(...)

seem to be fixed. You just have to define the property

"com.ibm.notes.enable.preferences = true"

at page level in the Composite Application. Then Lotusscript "knows" that it's running inside a CA component.

It was more a documentation issue, because it's not mentioned in the Designer's online help.
However, it's here in the wiki:
http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/compappwiki.nsf/revisions/AA7A9FFD70CA64F985257456005401D8?OpenDocument

The wiki is the new online help ;-)

Maybe a MindPlan wiki would be good as well...

Karsten Lehmann | January 15th, 2009 00:33:37 | Comments (0) | Permanent Link

Some words about our current status and what we're currently working on:

We're currently doing some tests with MindPlan on the official release of the Notes 8.5 client that was released yesterday. We did not have that Notes build version for testing before, only a code drop from the end of October and some additional patches. So I cannot say much at the moment about any issues.
The standalone versions of MindPlan on Windows and Mac should work normally, they often don't have problems with Notes client specifics, because they only need a few Java API methods for the data storage that are quite stable.
Regarding the MindPlan Composite Application plugin, here are some already known issues:

Eclipse selection implementation changed
The code in our toolbar icon to open a MindPlan from one of the MindPlan Notes views is not compatible with Notes 8.5, because there was a change in the underlying Expeditor platform. So I expect this toolbar action not to work.
This issue is already fixed (the "Eclipse selection" plugin of the Composite Application Library at www.openntf.org has the same issue, IBM is notified about it).
A workaround for this is to use the view actions "Actions/Open in MindPlan..." or open the MindPlan with "File/Open/Open MindPlan..." in the application.

NotesUIWorkspace.GetComponentViewPreference(String) is broken in 8.5 GA
This is quite annoying, because that method is a standard Lotusscript method to get static Composite Application preferences in an NSF component and in the 8.5 GA version it does not return ANY result, it only throws an error.
I think we used it in the "DocumentViewer" sample Composite Applications to hide the action bars of the Notes form. Many CAs should be broken because of this bug, so I hope IBM will release a hotfix for this issue soon (I found it two days after christmas and reported it, but it was too late to change the GA build).
I'm also seeing some other problems with the "Editable DocumentViewer" sample MindPlan Composite Application, but had no time so far to figure out what is causing this. Looks like editing a node document in the "DocumentViewer" component does not get reported to the MindPlan application. The funny thing is that is it working when I start the Notes client from the Eclipse development system.

Mac MindPlan Composite Application status
The drag and drop issues that we had during the last months has been fixed by Apple with Mac OS X 10.5.6. So drap and drop does not get interrupted any more. We had one more prio 1 issue (keyboard shortcuts not working) and talked with IBM about it. It was an Expeditor issue and not easy to fix. Don't know yet if this has been addressed, because they were afraid of the impact of the bugfix code on other parts of the product. I still need to update my Mac Eclipse development environment to the new Notes platform version.

The MindPlan standalone version on the Mac however should still be stable and the first beta to be released as official Mac version.

Karsten Lehmann | January 7th, 2009 10:48:16 | Comments (0) | Permanent Link

Here are the updated session details of Lotusphere session AD303 that I'm doing together with Michael Zink/IBM Austria:

AD303: Leveraging 3rd Party Components in IBM Lotus Notes Composite Applications

Session track	Track Two: Application Development
Session id	AD303
Session date	01/20/2009
Session time	1:30pm - 2:30pm
Session location	SW Mockingbird
Session name	Leveraging 3rd Party Components in IBM Lotus Notes Composite Applications
Session abstract	The concept of composite applications is ideal for the integration of different applications and services. A number of different application types are supported -- right out of the box - and can easily be integrated. But what about things like 3270 terminals, Microsoft Office, native or .NET applications? Can those be integrated into Lotus Notes as well? Find out what you get out of the box and learn more about the concepts for integrating your legacy and 3rd party applications. If you do have different types of applications that you need to integrate, then this a " do not miss" session!
Speakers	Michael Zink Karsten Lehmann

Karsten Lehmann | December 31st, 2008 13:42:24 | Comments (0) | Permanent Link