Creating a Lotus Notes View with NotesView and AJAX

When we had to develop Lotus Views for the Web interfaces (a lot of times, of course), we needed something AJAXy. AJAX views for Domino were available for quite a while in Web Access mail template, but the code is practically not re-usable there. So, during our search efforts, we came across the brilliant project NotesView2 at openntf.org. You can see the demo and download the database here (.zip, 3Mb).

To fill in some missing features in this project, we've have added the following options to the NotesView2 template:

1. Scrolling with support for mouse-wheel and jump scrolling to any desired line in the view

   Used an open source scroller component and wrote an agent to return XML data to be able to scroll up

2. Refresh with preserving any expanded categories, while showing new data

   While loading the data we try to keep the view structure using a view object and refresh categories, showing fresh data

3. If the view is opened in a frame, it is possible to go back from an open document to the view in the same state using "Back" browser button (frame is used for storing view status)
4. Different views now open without page refresh in the same URL (for example, when you click on navigation links in left frame, right frame is not reloaded completely, only different views are loaded)
5. You can define which column has the links to the documents
6. Style headers, categories and cells, depending on columns, with CSS and attributes
7. Show total columns anywhere in the views

   Changed XML processing here

8. Lotus-like keyboard control interface (e.g., +/- to expand or collapse categories)
9. "Loading" icon at the top of the page
10. Session check: when Domino session expires, a user gets relevant message (instead of just hanging on the user)

The screenshot displays the numbers near each item from the list (except for the session message): You can see the demo and download the database here (.zip, 3Mb).