Sanity Check

Yesterday my boss approved the purchase of the brand new course "Developing XPages using Domino Designer 8.5" from The Learning Continuum Company (TLCC) . Its on sale for the next 2 weeks at $699. TLCC courseware uses Notes to teach Notes. The content, exercises, and demos are all contained in NSF's. TLCC leverages Notes functionality like few other courseware vendors I've experienced. For example, they make provision for you to replicate the lessons and course discussion databases with the TLCC servers to obtain course updates/fixes as well as to participate in discussions with other students and the course instructors (requires sending a safe copy of your Notes ID to TLCC). This is probably the 7th or 8th TLCC course that we've downloaded through the years beginning in Notes Domino 5. 

Now I am not really an XPages neophyte as I've created a few simple applications, but there are certainly a number of walls that I need to break through before I can be confident that I can produce an XPage app with the same or better functionality as a Notes application in the same amount of time. With all the blog posts, tutorials, wikis, and sample databases out there on XPages, plus the fact that I was fortunate enough to attend Lotusphere this year (won a ticket) and attend many XPages sessions, you could argue that I have exposure to more than enough information out there that anyone with half a brain should be able to figure out XPages. Well, we all learn differently and personally, I tend to prefer a gradual systematic learning process which TLCC provides. I've found that once I've got a solid foundation with a tool, I can tear through the wikis and other resources as well as anyone.

I'm only about 20% through this 28 hour course and already I am psyched up, energized, and creating a list of mini and medium size XPage projects that I'd like to start tackling in the weeks and months after completing the course. Most of the projects are to add web functionality to existing Notes apps as well as refreshing some tired old web front ends. One of the first ones will be to replace the defunct web interface to a Notes Helpdesk application that never quite passed user acceptance. That was one of my first Domino web projects around 5 years ago and I never really got the interface fully working to my (or user's) satisfaction. Fortunately, along came Notes on a stick (Notes Nomad) and the customer found it very convenient to just continue using the rich Notes interface in the field and so I abandoned that effort. If at first you don't succeed, try try again. This time I'll be armed with XPages.

Adding external RDB access to XPages has been promised for a future release of  Notes Domino (post 8.5.1) making it a much more flexible, powerful, and even potentially mainstream platform for Web Dev. However, these sort of promises, as we have seen with other desirable features, have a way of slipping into the next next release or later if they don't make the list of priorities. If this is a priority for you, I highly recommend voting on John Mackey's Idea Jam submission here.

In the last week couple of weeks at my company we've had discussion over creating an application to track defective product shipments from vendors in each of our hundred plus retail stores. In our industry, these products are relatively inexpensive, personalized one-of-a-kind items that would only be of interest to the customer that order it. Thus, if an order is refused by our end customer for quality we generally will just destroy it rather than ship it back which would be a waste of money. Our vendor will reimburse us if we properly document the refusal with all the pertinent information. The refusal ratio will probably be in the 2-5% range. We use Lotus Notes in-store, but only on one computer. My thoughts are to create this tracking application in xPages so it can be accessed conveniently from any in-store PC via a web browser. So, now I will be working on a prototype. The basic architecture in Notes-speak would be a main form with the Store information, date, and the person who is submitting the data and a second form, probably a response document, that would record the details for each refused product. So one parent document would be related to many detail documents. If i did this in Notes I would display the detail form in an embedded view and I would check off that box that limts the documents displayed to the current thread which effectively would display just the detail response documents. I sat through most of the the xPage presentations at Lotusphere and am not sure if there is an equivalent option in xPages to display just the response docs. I know you can limit a view to documents with a key, such as the NoteID of the parent document. What I am wondering about is performance as the database grows. There's not a lot of infomation out there on the scalability of xPage technique like filtering a view. Questions abound:

• If I have a view containing 50,000 or more detail records, will the matching detail records quickly show up in the embedded view of the parent document using basic view filtering?
• Are some techniques of doing this more efficient than others?
• Is there any advantage or disadvantage of making the detail record a response document to the parent record in xPages?

If you're an xPert with xPerience with xPages and can help here, I'd appreciate your comments. I really wish there was an A-Z book on xPages, like a Red Book that goes through xPages more thoroughly. At this point there's a smorgasborg of unstructured ways to learn xPages like the Designer Wikki, code samples and tutorials from John Mackey, Matt White (and Elguji), Chris Toohey and IBM. Those are all helpful, but I guess I'm looking for The xPages Bible, an authoritative source that walks through everything including that huge Script Editor that also warns about techniques that work initially, but are not scalable. Where's my xBible?