Yellow is the New Blog

IBM did something rather cool this year in connection to the BOF sessions at Lotusphere: they created a LotusLive group associated with each, which includes a discussion forum allowing the BOF to continue in virtual mode indefinitely. If you're a DXL fan - or would like to be but don't quite trust it yet - please join the DXL in the Wild group.

Urs Meli asked if there's a list of known bugs, missing features and workarounds. I started a thread in the group discussion forum in the hopes of consolidating such a list. As time permits, I'll be adding the items I'm already aware of as responses to that thread; if you have any to add, please drop by and post them.

In response to: DXL Erros

Urs, I'm not aware of any consolidated list of known bugs, so I created a discussion topic on LotusLive within the "DXL in the Wild" group associated with the BOF I co-moderated with Mac Guidera: https://apps.lotuslive.com/contacts/groupprofiles/groupForum/18083 As time permits, I'll post to that thread a list of the issues Lotus 911 has become aware of in our use of DXL. In the meantime, remember that setting the ForceNoteFormat property to True when exporting gives you the raw format, which is "round-trip" safe; in other words, although the output for most design element types is impossible to parse, it at least allows note archival and restoral without any loss of fidelity.

import lotus.domino.*;
public class JavaAgent extends AgentBase {
public void NotesMain() {
try {
Session session = getSession();
AgentContext agentContext = session.getAgentContext();
DxlFactory.createAgent("James Bond", DxlAgent.LOTUSSCRIPT).addCodeEvent("Initialize", "Sub Initialize\n'Shaken, not stirred.\nEnd Sub").toDesignElement(agentContext.getCurrentDatabase());
} catch(Exception e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}

Rocky submitted an idea requesting that IBM finish the job of DXL completeness and round-trip fidelity. For what it's worth, I was the one who asked for that at "Ask the Developers". It was cool to see Bob Balaban support us on this, both by standing and joining the applause when I asked the question, and by publicly asking his boss to give him the resources to make this happen. Since IBM watches ideaJam as one way of measuring community support for feature requests, go promote Rocky's idea if you haven't already. For bonus points, leave a comment explaining why you support this; the current weighting system takes both net promotion count and number/age of comments into account when determining popularity of ideas, so the more comments and votes it receives, the longer it will retain its current status of top idea.

For the longer term, I created a BleedYellow community called "DXL Fanatics" and will occasionally be posting bookmarks of interest as I find them. Please join if the community name aptly describes you. I suspect it'll start out as something of a "support group", but as (not if... I'm opting for optimism) IBM continues to mature this API, perhaps this will be a gathering place for some exciting innovation.

(cross-posted from TimTripcony.com)