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): Lotus Notes View с AJAX You can see the demo and download the database here (.zip, 3Mb).


Questions re NotesView

Submitted by Kerry (not verified) on April 8, 2009 - 13:16.

Hi

from Australia.

I had useed this about a year or so ago, but gave up beacuse of the scrolling issues etc. It is good to see that you have addressed these as I have a needed to use this again.

I have a couple of questions please......

1) I have added a search bar via View.toggleSearchBar(). However, when it is toggled on, the cell/row it is in becomes wider that the rest of the table.

1a)Can this be set visible by default, so the user doen't have to toggle it on?

2) it originally said that the database is NOT full text indexed even though it is. I Commented out the code that checks this via an Agent. I was wondering if there is a reason it was removed?

3) Is there any way to overcome the "session has expired" error? I get the error even if I have just logged in and try a full text search. If it is a search where only three items are returned it works, but if I search for Peter it bombs out with session expired.

The first column returned has a image vwicn000.gif, which doesn't exist on teh server. Just wondering how this is controlled.

4) Is there any way to adjust the size of the table, seems like setting "linestoshow" & "linestoget" should control this but it doesn't.

5)Lastly the column width in the view seems to be funny when you expnad a single category. The columns on teh right seem to bunch up. However, if you do a expand all everything is fine.

Thank you

Search Bar

Submitted by Roman Romenskiy on April 10, 2009 - 18:20.

Hi,

Great to see that our site is looked at from Australia as well.

Really, we didn't test the NotesView2 with full-text search bar enabled, as we just didn't need it in the projects we did with it. So, unfortunately, right now if there are any bugs related with the search bar, we don't know too much about nature of these.

So, we will probably fix those, whenever we would need full-text seach together with NotesView2. Or, as the sources are available, you could try to debug those.

Let me know if we can help with anything else.

Thanks, Roman.

Thanks for the response

Submitted by Kerry (not verified) on April 14, 2009 - 11:46.

Thanks for the response Roman.

regards
Kerry

Scroll support in NotesView2

Submitted by Darko Aleksic (not verified) on January 29, 2009 - 22:59.

Dobro vecer Sergey,

Greetings from a serbian Notes/Domino developer.
In several web application that i have developed lately I have also used NotesView2 at openntf.org.

However my users have lately started to scream and complain about the lausy mouse scroll support in that component.

I like what you have done and I am impressed by your work and the list of features that you have added to NotesView2 is most impressive.

I am using also 2.1.6 and the only feature I need for the moment is the scroll support. Do you have some tips and instructions of how I can re-use your magnificent work and adapt the standard 2.1.6 component with only scroll support (with minimal effort and not adapting alot of code that may interfere with the rest of the functionality in my applications)?

Any help is appreciated.

Kind regards,

Darko

Re: Scroll support in NotesView2

Submitted by Roman Romenskiy on January 30, 2009 - 16:55.

Zdravo, Darko!

Great to hear from Serbia. As there were quite few complex changes intergrated into this component together, so I would recommend you to try to re-use the whole version modified by our team in your application. Generally, once you get it integrated, it shouldn't require to adapt a lot of code, as general concept of NotesView2 is the same.

You can download the Help database sample using the link above - the source code is open, so you can get it from there and try to integrate into your app. Let me know if there are any problems with that approach.

Thanks,
Roman.

Hvala Romane, I appreciate

Submitted by Darko Aleksic (not verified) on February 3, 2009 - 14:50.

Hvala Romane,

I appreciate you answer.
I'll try to reuse your solution in future releases of my applications.

Kind regards,

Darko

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