For those that have been following along in the LotusUserGroup.org Developer Tips newsletter, it's time!

Imagine if you will, a scenario. It involves slides, chairs, lots of open laptops, and *killer* content. I'm talking about Lotusphere, in which we spend a week in geek overdrive, fighting colds and hangovers to bravely attend sessions (some starting as early as 7AM) while cramming in as much new knowledge as our brains will allow. And that's just usually on the first day!

The bottom line is this — while we're there, our brains flurry with activity, and we gleefully rub our hands together while dreaming of all the cool new things we can do with this information once we get back to the office.

Then — life happens. A new project comes up that demands your attention. Your "cool new things to try from Lotusphere" list just got put on the back burner. Will you ever get to it?

Here's our challenge. Let's "get to it!"

Let's all individually come up with ONE goal to accomplish based on something you really want to master that you learned at Lotusphere. By keeping it at just one small goal, the odds that you'll follow through are much greater than if it's a large project.

Because this is based on what you learned at Lotusphere, that session had to have a speaker. If you get stuck, you can post your question on the LUG group blog, or send us an email with your goal, problem, and session speaker. Tom and I will try our hardest to get in touch with the speaker to help you through your problem.

Here's the steps we'll all be taking together (and posting our progress):

1. Identify your goal.

2. Identify the Lotusphere session you attended that your goal is based on, or can help you achieve your goal.

3. Sign up to take part by emailing me at jess.42@gmail.com, Tom at duffbert@gmail.com, or respond right here in the comments (preferred).

4. I'll be asking us for weekly (or bi-weekly) updates on the blog. Post your progress, and any questions you have. We'll do our best to find the speaker (or someone) to help you. If you finish in the meantime, great!

Here's what Tom and I are going to be doing for our goals.

Tom is going to attempt to add a dynamic chart to his Notes application with the help of Julian Robichaux and Rob McDonah's session, BP210 — Reports, Charts and Graphs in IBM Lotus Notes.

I am going to webify a Notes view by downloading, installing and configuring Ext.nd, based on what I saw by Rich Waters and Jack Ratcliff's BP207 — From IBM Lotus Notes Client Application to Ajax-Powered Rich Internet Application in Less than 10 Lines of Code!

Do you think you're up for the challenge?

1. Rich Waters04/21/2008 06:41:28 PM
Homepage: http://www.rich-waters.com/blog

Sounds like a good plan. Feel free to drop me a line if you have any questions / issues.

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2. Jack Ratcliff04/21/2008 11:18:58 PM
Homepage: http://jackratcliff.com

Hey, if Rich is too busy to help I'm sure I know enough about Ext.nd to lend a hand.

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3. Curt Stone04/24/2008 07:35:03 AM
Homepage: http://www.curtsisland.com

Great idea! This same idea has been on my mind.
I like both of your choices of sessions to mess with.
Here's a question I have from something I tried today. In BP210, there's a slide about reading the xml format from a Notes view
(?ReadViewEntries) directly into MS Excel. I'm using Excel 2003, and when I simply open the view, your presented with 3 choices:
1) As an xml list
2) As a Read-Only workbook
3) Use the XML source task pane

I'm thinking that the xml option would be a really great way of linking directly to the source without using the odbc driver(requires Notesql driver installed). I tried each of these choices and the output is not exactly perfect in either case. Any suggestions would be great. I only spent about 15 minutes so I'll continue to research. Thanks guys!

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4. Curt Stone04/25/2008 06:55:03 AM
Homepage: http://www.curtsisland.com

As a follow-up to my last post, I tried the (SimpleXMLExcelExport) agent from the sample database. By calling the agent and a view as a parameter, Excel launched and gave me the same XML dialog box. I chose number 1 and it worked great. This is nice because the data is live and you can add other calculations or graphs to your spreadsheet based on the live Notes data.
I proceeded to try this same agent with one of my own databases. The code was not liking some characters in some large text strings like the "&". I did and replacesubstring on it and I got another error on a different field but have not yet figured what the issue is. (Ran out of play time)

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5. Jess Stratton04/28/2008 01:22:38 PM

Thanks Rich and Jack!!
Curt, I have popped off an email to Julian asking him. I will be seeing him this week at the conference (Admin/LotusDeveloper2008 in Boston), so hopefully we can get an answer for you!!

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6. Julian Robichaux04/29/2008 12:21:38 PM
Homepage: http://www.nsftools.com

Curt -

For the XML thing, I think you need Excel 2007 to make it look pretty when you read it. If you have Excel 2003 and you open a view in Internet Explorer (regular, not with ReadViewEntries), you should have an option to "Export to Excel" though. Same concept, but using an HTML table instead of XML.

Regarding the agent, you'll need to parse out all the illegal XML characters for that to work in the general case. Me and Rob talked about that before the session, but never got around to putting the code in to parse the data. You have to get rid of things like &, <, and > at the very least, although strictly you need to parse out more than that. You could also dump everything into a CDATA section.

Sorry for the problems. Let me know how it goes.

- Julian

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7. Curt Stone05/01/2008 12:15:27 PM
Homepage: http://www.curtsisland.com

@Julian and Jess,
Hope you guys are having a great conference! Wish I was there!

Thanks for the info/suggestions/confirmations! You guys are Awesome! Many aligators snapping at me this week. Hopefully, I'll get more time to play soon. Cheers!

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