The Attachment Viewer 2.0.1 for Lotus Notes is now posted on this site. I fixed a couple of problems reported and it looks like the Microsoft Office Converter EXE is now behaving a bit better. From the original post (click here), you may need to install the inter-op libraries for your version of MS Office in order to use it. You need to be running at least Lotus Notes 8.5.2 for this update.
Drag this to My Widgets in Lotus Notes
@DavidLeedy, the XPages video, tutorial, and overall master, passed this site on to me in a Tweet mention earlier this week – thanks!
The gallery actually uses Dojo for its presentation, it looks like it has all of the ones the Dojo campus has and its pretty easy to navigate. Best of all it links to the documentation and has the source code right there for you, I love it.
Click image to launch gallery
I just had to plug this to the Eclipse Developer community:Free Sidebar App: OSGi Sidebar Console
After a few days with the new download tracking plug-in installed on my blog I am already seeing its value – somewhat. The release of the Multiple Database Search plug-in for Lotus Notes on OpenNTF shows 35 people have downloaded the source and install site. The download manager WP-DownloadManager, shows 56 downloads of the widget that installs the plugin.
The problem is the log shows eight of those downloads (of the widget) to be either duplicates or multiple downloads from the same IP address. This means the net difference is 13. So even though the numbers are close this does show some people have more interest in just using it versus scanning the source code.
At this point, there are many plug-ins available for Lotus Notes. Since the Lotus Notes 8.0 release the Notes client has been pushed into the world of Eclipse plug-ins and re-usable Java code.
Today I am going to introduce, for those who may not know it already, what I consider one of the coolest social plug-in for the Notes client – it is WildFire by ISW. The plug-in is great from many perspectives but the key things I like best are these:
So you have a chance to check it out then do it!
Myself and colleague (Igor Belakovskiy) will be publishing a new widget on OpenNTF that gives the end user the ability to search N number of local databases. The first version only supports local; and yes we have plans on supporting remote servers also. I wanted to get a broader interest in this plug-in from my reader community. It will be distributed internally for now until we work out any glaring issues. We plan on publishing it within the next couple of weeks. Some key takeaways from a developer perspective are this:
So in short, this solution integrates naturally with the existing search options in the Lotus Notes client. So the user get’s a familiar look and feel. The performance will be based on whether the databases you select are full text indexed or not.
More to come…
My Widgets is a very powerful and easy method for deploying Eclipse features and plug-ins to the Lotus Notes 8.5.1 clients and above. If not careful, it can however bite you. So here is my story…
I had some strange behaviors when I was sending out the attachment viewer in the beginning so I figured I would share those experiences.
When you create a Features and Plug-ins widget using the “Getting Started with Widgets…” icon in the Notes client you basically point it at an Eclipse update site on some HTTP server and select which features you want to install. The wizard generates the extension.xml you see below.
The problem I had was; when I changed the update site (compiled new features and plug-ins) the versions for the features and plug-ins were updated (remember the .qualifier post?) and no longer matched the versions specified in the widget. So I generated a new widget using the wizard based on the newly compiled feature versions in the Eclipse update site. This would be fine if I wanted whole new features to be installed but in the end I only wanted one widget. So what did I have to do?
Well, I had to save the extension.xml locally and edit it. The reason is, I needed to retain the widget Id (in red below) so the Notes client would prompt me to update the existing widget – versus installing a new one. You can see the widgets extension.xml below. I would then change the feature version (install and requirement versions), also in red below to the new versions. You then post this in the catalog or send back out to your users via email to have the new Eclipse features install and the existing widget “upgraded”. I actually ended up storing the extension.xml in source control with the update site so the Id will always be retained.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <webcontextConfiguration version="1.1"> <palleteItem contributeToSideshelfOnStartup="false" doubleClickCommandId="" hideThumbnail="false" i id="1399769204" imageUrl="http://blog.balfes.net/sites/atviewer-pub/at-icon.png" providerId="com.ibm.rcp.toolbox.prov.provider.ToolboxProvisioning" singletonSidebar="false" title="Attachment Viewer Feature" url="http://blog.balfes.net/sites/atviewer-pub" viewImageUrl=""> <data> <installManifest> <![CDATA[<install> <installfeature version="1.0.0.201010051341"> <requirements> <feature version="1.0.0.201010051341" match="compatible" /> </requirements> </installfeature> </install> ]]></installManifest> </data> </palleteItem> </webcontextConfiguration>
I was working one day and I used the attachment viewer to view a PDF a colleague had sent me. Not realizing what I was doing, I switched back to the inbox to see what new email had come on. Guess what, the PDF disappears and a new selection was selected – I totally lost my place in the PDF. Doh..I just thought of a new cool feature!
I thought, how cool would it be if I could “pin” the attachment in the viewer so as long as its pinned the selected attachment never changes. This would allow me to navigate across many different documents and views and never lose the PDF I am reading. This was actually a dead simple feature and I hope to get this out on OpenNTF soon. I would be interested to hear if you think this is a good feature or not.
The pinning function is in the form of an icon that is put to the right of the page. I just add a new boolean variable to the page and show the icons relative to its value:
function constructPin(){
var headerArea = document.getElementById("header");
if (_pinned){
headerArea.innerHTML = "<img style=\"float: right;\" title=\"Un-pin Attachment\" src='icons/pinned-down.png' onClick=\"togglePin();\"></img>";
}else{
headerArea.innerHTML = "<img style=\"float: right;\" title=\"Pin Attachment\" src='icons/pinned-up.png' onClick=\"togglePin();\"></img>";
}
}
The result is a clickable icon that toggles whether the current selection is pinned or not:
Pin Attachment
Unpin Attachment
Go ahead and install the following widget into your Notes client. If you are not familiar with how to install the widget with the “extension.xml” below you can watch this video I posted that shows how to enable widgets and install the viewer.
Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated!
So I was challenged a couple of days ago by Art Thomas to give him an attachment viewer for when he receives images, movies, etc in mail and he just wants to immediately view them without launching them individually. I started thinking about how I would implement it and I came to the conclusion that we kind of have the ultimate viewer right at our disposable – the SWT Browser! So in short, watch the video and let me know what you think.
I gave this out internally for now as a Widget and also showed some people how to change their mail application to have the viewer embedded into Memo and Reply forms (as I demonstrate in the video). I think this project will be good for OpenNTF and a couple of tutorial videos on how I did it….more to come.
For video click more.
A buddy in IBM Software Services for Lotus – Germany, Robert Schneider, wrote a nice article about plug-in development and using the IBM Multimedia library. This uses a Features and Plug-in widget to assist in the deployment of the newly created Eclipse artifact. It is a great tutorial for how these things are connected and then deployed.
This article explains how to create an extension for IBM® Lotus Notes® 8.0 and later that allows you to open a preconfigured URL (for example, Lotus Notes Multimedia Library) in a newly opened browser window by selecting a menu entry in the Help menu.