The Jagular

In my last post, I mentioned an error in BetterListStr, a class I've been using for nearly a year now. Jens Augustiny of LIGONET has kindly pointed out a fix which I have (finally) incorporated. That, along with a few other small improvments, can be seen below.



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Have you ever been faced with creating a form with 30 or more lines of repetitive sets of design elements? It can make for a boring afternoon, a strong likelyhood of at least one cut and paste error, and a chance at RSI as a bonus.

In my case, I couldn't collapse the design by storing the data in one field and breaking it out to display columns or some similar. I decided that creating 30x7 controls just wasn't a fun option. Using DXL export/import as a shortcut. seemed like a good alternative. How does exporting and importing the data help? Well, if you don't do anything else, it won't help. On the other hand, you can extract the section of DXL that represents your row of design elements, do a rext replace on the design element names to create a new row, and paste that new row into a new version of the DXL document, the process might be done with less typing.

Note: to make this really easy, you must use a common prefix for all your design elements (eg. "row1_"). You can then turn all elements on row 1 into row 2 with just one text replace. After all, the point is to benefit from the power of applied laziness here. Why make a shortcut that doesn't minimize the effort?

I might not have save much time doing this the first time, but I'll definitely benefit the next time I need to do this. You, dear reader, can benefit without needing to create the import export code.

Note: the first block of code below exports all forms in db to file c:\dxl\. If you only want to export one form, copy the form to a db with no other forms. I'm sure there's a more elegant solution, but I was in a hurry. The second block of code imports the file c:\dxl\ImportMe2.

I still think have to prepare for DXL work by setting properties vs using parameters is cryptic. How are you supposed to know which ones to use? The documentation contains hints, not complete recipes. That's one reason I'm posting this.

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Ever needed to compare two Notes documents field by field? Today I finally got around to writing a tool I've needed for a while. It lets you select a form name and a view name. You then press a button and pick two documents via a picklist. All fields in the two documents are compared. The results are displayed side by side, with a "=" or a "<>" displayed between the two values



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Bill Buchan has written on how  valuable lists are in Lotusscript.  He's right.  For a recent project, I created a new list-based class, a simplification of one I'd created for my IBM article, Using the Object-Oriented Features of Lotusscript.  The class in the article, BetterList, is meant to be versatile and able to store objects of different types.  My new class, BetterListStr, just stores strings.

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Like the front company from the James Bond books, this agent does it all - if you want data exported to Excel.  Give it a view, a list of fields, and, if desired, a form to override a view's form formula.  This agent will then push all the requested fields from all the documents in the selected view out to Excel.

It won't currently do hidden views, but you could change that.

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I came up with this code two weeks back when it became clear there were more than a few duplicate documents in some databases I work on. It's a common enough situation that I thought the code was worth sharing.

It ran through about 18,000 documents in 2 minutes (possibly less, I wasn't timing too precisely). This code demonstrates basic list usage in Lotusscript.

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Ok, maybe not infinite, but pretty big all the same.

Have you ever needed a comment history in a form that could capture comments of any size? with embedded images? and attachments? And you don't want the silly users messing things up by entering their comments out of order like they'd do if you gave them a simple rich text field and trusted them?



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