TexasSwede

 Bill Buchan just wrote about exporting data to Excel using a CSV file. There is actually a cool and surprisingly easy way to generate documents that show up in Excel as real spreadsheets, with formatting, colors, etc.

Simply create a file containing a HTML table. It may even work with multiple tables. You can use tags like <B> and <I> for bold/italic, and use the color attribute to set text color and background color. Use the colspan attribute to split a cell over multiple columns.

Save the file in Lotusscript as a regular text file, but with the extension XML XLS. Excel, as well as OpenOffice.org, will read the HTML and present as a nice spreadsheet.

Not Forum Friday, but Usenet Tuesday. :-)  A user in comp.groupware.lotus-notes.programmer had a question about generating Notes document remotely/in an automated way from another web application, using Perl:

> We have a Lotus Notes application and we would like to automate
> creating a new document or record in that application from another web
> based application.
>
> Here are the details:
> User action on web application triggers a PERL script to create a new
> record (document) in Lotus Notes (or Domino).

Here is my suggestion:

Here is a sample agent that uses the class and print the arguments to the browser. Just expand on that code to create the document in the database:

Sub Initialize
 Dim url As New URLclass

 Dim params As Variant
 params = url.GetParams()
 Forall x In params
   Print Listtag(x) & " = " & params(Listtag(x)) & "<br>"
 End Forall
End Sub

Lists are a data type that I don't think is used enough. Many Notes developers, even some that been programming in the environment for years, don't use this very powerful feature. In previous years, Bill Buchan have been talking about lists in some of his Lotussphere sessions, and when asking how many in the audience that used lists, less than 10% raised their hands.

So what are lists? They are a data type, similar to an array, but instead of using a numeric index, it uses a string as index, or tag as it is called.

This makes it easy to address items in the list, check if they exists, etc.

Here is a simple example:

Dim age List as Integer

Dim name as String

age( "karl" ) = 38

age( "erik" ) = 7

name = InputBox$( "Enter name:" )

If IsElement(age(Lcase(name))) = True Then

MsgBox name & " is " & age(lcase(name)) & " years old."

Else

MsgBox name & " does not occur in the list."

End If

This code define a list of integers, containing the age of two people. When a name is entered in the input box, IsElement is used to check if an item with that name is found in the list. If it is, the age is displayed, if not another message is displayed, saying that the name was not found.

Note that the list tag (name in this case) is case sensitive! 

To loop through a list and display all the values, use ForAll. Here is an example where we loop thorugh all the entries and display their list tags as well as the values:

Dim age List As Integer
age( "Karl" ) = 38
age( "Erik" ) = 7
Forall a In age
Msgbox Listtag(a) & " is " & a & " years old."
End Forall

Some of the things I use lists for are web agents, where I parse the URL passed for parameters, and build a list of them. Then it is very easy to write code that check for parameters and get the value if they exist.

I wrote an article about lists for The View, published in November/December 2006. You can find more details and examples there.