Portaldomosphere

 Well, as you can probably imagine I am either up late or awake early. If you can believe it, it is the latter. So I have had my cat nap and now it is time to pound back on this code that I am trying to frantically finish. Don't get me wrong, I love developing and administering (that word is a topic for another post) - but I start to get this sense of blurriness between reality and whatever this is. I see it no different than I would imagine an accountant sees his ledger or "The Fake Steve Jobs" sees a bottle of Midol and a cosmo. (I imagine the real Steve Jobs would not order froo froo drinks but.. ehhh) - see, things get blurry

Ok so I need to jump away from the paragraph - and I will not sit here and talk about any of this code until a time where I have not been bangin this stuff out. So, to break montony of my typical confsuing dreck - I give you some rap - from the HP.

 Over the next few days - I wil be posting about integrating Lotus Notes 8 Client and Portlet Factory 6.0.2 Portlets.

Assuming you will want to try this out, you will need the following software :

1. Lotus Notes 8 Designer
2. Portlet Factory 6.0.2 (I will not be using RAD in my examples)
3. Lotus Component Designer
4. Websphere Portal 6.0.1.1
5. Cloudscape 10.1
6. Derby Workbench (optional if you know how to use the command line tools for Cloudscape)

My first post will be in a couple of days.

Ok, so I am trucking along getting this project done and all of a sudden, Portlet Factory (well eclipse) comes back and tells me I have too many 

Main Actions. WHAT??!?!

Well, after looking for a short period of time, I see that some bozo has shoved this VERY IMPORTANT checkbox under the "Advanced" section of the builder. This is usually a collapsed section where you put stuff like localization settings and profiling stuff.

By the way - for those of you who are not getting this... quick explanation. Portlet Factory uses modules called "models". These models usualyl contain elements that handle one type of portlet or maybe one web service with multiple methods. The problem is, you can only have ONE main method, after that you get errors basically. Somewhat like if you could tell Domino to have multiple default forms and someone opens a database and Notes is confused by it.

Ok thanks - that is my irritation for the day. 

 I have a new friend. Its name is HTML Template.

My friend allows me to format my data in any which way I wish within Portlet Factory. All I have to tell it is what field I want to use by using span tags. Sometimes I might say something like :

<tr>

<td><span name="FirstName" /> <br /><span name"StreetAddress" /><br /><span name="City" /><br /><span name="State">  <span name="zip"></td>

<td><span name="LastName /></td>

</tr>

This allows Portlet Factory to fill in the information I wish and where I wish it to go. But make sure you put all the fields that are coming in through your web service in or this gets ugly..... VERY ugly

So remember, when Portlet Factory makes ugly portlets, just use HTML Templates.