off the Hook

I've just completed a week at Lotus "Top Gun" training, which is targeted at  updating the IBM sales team and Business Partners on the latest innovations in the Lotus portfolio and strategic direction, including solutions such as Notes/Domino 8.0, the Sametime product family; Quickr 8.0; Lotus Connections; the Portal offerings, including Web Content Management & e-Forms; Lotus Symphony; the Mobile & Enterprise Access offerings; Dashboards, and more. It's amazing how much has changed since Lotusphere just a few months ago. Lotus has delivered significant updates to each of these products and I got to see under the hood of what is coming in the next few months.

Along those lines, Lotus 911 has conducted some Lotusphere Comes To You (LCTY) events in a few cities, but I'd like to offer a "LCTY, NO REALLY" event to those who may be interested. Essentially, my idea is to set aside a full-day (less if you prefer) to come visit you at YOUR location and share these updates, do live demos, and perhaps even help you break through some admin and/or development barriers you may have. I will be in the central Florida area the second half of this week and in Chicago next week, but I'm pretty open the weeks after. Drop me a line if this sounds like something that appeals to you.

Declan pitched the idea of Forum Friday's on his blog about picking a question on Notes.net and responding to it with a blog entry. I think this is a great way to get forum readers into the Domino blogging community, so I gave it a shot. I went to notes.net and picked the first entry I saw without a comment: Create Dialog Box Like Mail Address. I'm not sure if this is what Mr. Dressler is looking for, but it occurred to me that newer developers may not realize the power of @DialogBox or notesuiworkspace.DialogBox in LotusScript (and maybe even some guru's don't think of it). Basically, you can design any form you want and use it as a pop up box to collect or modify information on the underlying form (even if the fields on the underlying form are hidden). This is an effective way to move lesser used and/or non-printed data off of the main form to keep it clean, or to implement an interview-style "wizard" to collect user input in steps. The Lotusscript version can be further used to collect information into documents that are not open or even into a temporary document that is used just to get answers to questions, but never saved. Check it out in the Help file and start improving your user interfaces today.

 

Making a dialog box that does what this user requested should be relatively simple:

1. Create the form with two fields and a hotspot button between them. Tip: Put your form design elements in a table and use the [SIZETOTABLE] to make the best use of screen space
2. The first field is an editable single-value listbox field with an @DBLookup of the possible choices. Tip: make this a list of key values with the Doc UNID as an alias (e.g., key value | @DocumentUniqueID)
3. The second field is a single-value computed text field that equals itself (@ThisValue)
4. The hotspot button sets the second field to the selected value of the first field (since they only want ONE value).
5. Add a button to the calling form that runs script that calls notesuiworkspace.DialogBox and then copies the document that was selected using whatever method you want, such as.

Dim workspace As New NotesUIWorkspace

Dim session As New NotesSession

Dim db As NotesDatabase, otherDb As Notesdatabase

Set db = session.CurrentDatabase

'Set otherDb

Dim doc As New NotesDocument(db)

Call workspace.DialogBox( "Form", True, True, False, False, False, False, "Title", doc)

If doc.fieldname(0) <> "" Then

'Set your document, for example

Set doc = db.GetDocumentByUNID(doc.fieldname(0))

Call doc.CopyToDatabase( otherDb )

End If

By running it from the main form in this way, the dialog box becomes just a way to temporarily complete the action then throws away the temporary data AND bails out if the user clicks Cancel or no value is selected (because doc.fieldname(0) will equal "".

 

There are of course other variations that would work with things like embedded views, etc. If I understand the stated problem correctly though, I'd probably simplify the approach and just use a view picklist to capture the selected document's UNID then do the copy without adding the complexity of a dialog box with a hotspot button.

 

Regardless, the point is that dialog boxes are a powerful and flexible way to collect user input without junking up a main form.

BleedYellow.com was created by Lotus 911, Inc. in an effort to (1) showcase the capabilities of Lotus Connections, (2) create an online community and central gathering spot like Facebook specifically for the Lotus faithful, and (3) provide an integrated Domino server and development environment for registered Domino gurus.

 

We are very excited about hosting this community and continuing to expand its capabilities and invite you to share the ownership of this community with us.  If you haven't already, please register and unlock the power of social networking today.

 

Thanks,

Scott Hooks

VP of Services, Lotus 911