Okay, the compiler might complain, when the values are different. :-)

You miss the difference between class and instance members. ;-)

In LotusScript you only have instance members (Sub, Function, Property, Dim), but no class members.

If you want, e.g. count the objects created using a certain class, you need to have a common variable = attribute for all objects, not one for each object.

This could be the code, if LotusScript had class members:

Class Car
Static Dim carsTotal As Integer ' class attribute, static is the modifier used in Java

Public Sub New()
carsTotal = carsTotal + 1
End Sub

Static Function GetCarsTotal As Integer ' class method
GetCarsTotal = carsTotal
End Function
End Class

Class members could be used for central logging of object creation and destruction, object pools, central caching etc.

Have a look at common design patterns, especially Creator/Builder patterns for more use cases of class members.

The current release is 8.5 (publicly available), and there are no (documented) Java UI classes in there. Something undocumented classes somebody has found (hi Nathan) don't count.

Why not asking the user, if he wants to debug all or current application, when he activates debugging.

Like breakpoints, he could activate debugging for more than one application and can be presented a list of applications in debug mode, when deactivating debug: only current app, all apps or select in list.

Hi Starrow,

as much as I like your ideas, it would be nice, if you first search the existent ideas. At least for the points 2. and 4. I have written ideas already.

Thomas

Since hard limits could back-fire sometimes, I would propose database properties for start size and how the database should grow (by fixed size blocks or a fixed percentage, with or without a growth rate), e.g.
start with 50 MB and extend by 10 MB blocks or
start with 50 MB and extend by 10% of the current size or
start with 50 MB and extend by 10 MB the first time, 20 MB next time and so forth (100% growth rate for extensions)

Compact must leave those databases alone (normally) or reduce it back to a former size with a command line switch.

I think, it's the application author's responsibility to trim spaces on such fields.

I think, it could be a central Timer Service (new Domino server task), at which you could register agents to run on a specific date/time in the future. This schedule has to be written to disk internally (for power shortages), then there should be options, if/when to run agents, when the server was down, ...

I think, a notes.ini variable to set a log level would be perfect.

Ok, and where is the idea? This feature is implemented. Is your idea to document it properly? Assuming this, I promote...

@3, John Head
But are the analysts paying attention to the OGS? I read some blogger doubting that. (Don't know, who it was?) There are thousands of developers and admins, consultants, business partners and end-users. Why is IBM ignoring their interests? I mean, they have paid for the 'sphere...

... and Lotus Domino, of course, and Domino Designer and Domino Administrator.

I demoted, because I want to be able to choose, what interests me. And if I'm not interested in CompApps (or whatever the subject of the "super focus" is), I want to choose something else.

Wouldn't it be enough, if the sessions for one subject are in a "good" schedule without two in the same slot?

Doesn't do Sametime Connect 7.5.1 something similiar?

Thx again, Big Ben! :-D

I want to emphasize the version gap: When a new version of Domino goes gold, its JVM version is at least one version behind the (Sun's) current JVM. This isn't too great, but not to bad, since Java isn't developing so fast nowadays. But think of the Dojo version from the beginning of last year! The JavaScript and AJAX frameworks are making great steps forward.

Now, when implement customers any new version of Domino? In my experiences, this is at least one year after it came out. This makes a gap of at least two years between the Dojo version in the Domino server and the current one. Will you really use such an old version?

I would promote your last sentence: Make Lotus GUI more flexible and clear!
But design forms and pages using HTML? No.

Make them yourself!

As in the Notes client, you can create folders in the bookmark side bar and add design elements to them.

I don't think, that the collection (i. e. list) of documents takes a lot of disk space, but the contents of the view columns and their sort orders.

This can be done by a minor tweak to the mail template and a "Deferred Mail" mail.box, in which a single agent is responsible to sent deferred emails for all users.

The "tweak" includes: add a tab to the (Delivery Options) subform with a checkbox "Send later" and some date/time field(s) and add some lines of code to the CoreEmailClasses script library (QuerySave(), 2 times in Case MEMO_SEND, one time in Case MEMO_SEND_FILE), and create a copy of mailbox.ntf and add an scheduled agent, and perhaps some views, some fields to the Memo form, an agent to send immediately, a way to cancel,... ;-)

I see no way, how this could be made possible with (disconnected) replicas at all.

@2 Curt
If you want to hear more about this concept, and you come to Orlando, please attend our session
AD311 Object Oriented Programming with LotusScript – Take It To the Next Level
Thursday, 2008-01-24, 08:30am - 9:30am, SW 5-6

@2 Sorry Curt for answering so late. There really should be an email notification about new comments on ideas, one has written a comment for...

"we" means assono, a quite small consulting company in Germany. And there is no "MVC design element", because MVC is a design pattern (really, a compound pattern using some basic design patterns) or a paradigm: Separate the responsibilities for the data and business rules (Model), the presentation of current data (View != Notes Views) and the "glue", that is the code to propagate changes between model and view, to react on user actions, etc. (Controller) .

IMHO the "right" place for validation is the Model, because there can be different Views! Think of an application with a Notes Client front-end, an alternative Web front-end and some agents modifying documents. If you want to be sure to only store valid data, you would have to validate in the Notes form, the Web form (in most applications, this is a second form) and in EACH agent. That will certainly result in validation code duplication...

Now think of one Model class (for each different kind of document) responsible for the validation. One place to look for validation code, one place to change it. This usually reduces complexity, code duplication, and therefore development and maintenance time.

And this form-specific Model class could inherit a lot of common code from a base class: we have a BaseModel for this purpose, which holds a lot of infrastructure and convenience code.

@3 Slawek
Hope to see you in Orlando:
BOF109: Object-Orientated Programming (OOP) and Frameworks in LotusScript
Tuesday, 2008-01-22, 7:00am - 8:00am, Swan Hotel, Egret
;-)

Agents deselect documents automatically after running; actions can use agents...

How would you control the visual representation of "is mandatory?"
Placement, icon, preconditions...

Do you really delete all files at the time, you delete the user?

Or use your catalog.nsf to open the database by replica ID.

@1: ...and it would depend on the user to have JavaScript enabled.

Please explain, what this Grid thingy is more/other than a Domino cluster?

Sorry, couldn't resist. ;-)

Axel is absolutely right: It would be great for integration, but HARD to implement. VERY HARD!

Yeah, DominoTxn! :-D

On the other hand, this would get a monster database. And you cannot automatically delete anything, since it could be valid for future versions...

Duplicate - as far as I remember

How can this situation occur? Installing a server version installs a current version of NSD as does updating. You can manually install newer versions of NSD, but can older versions be on your server without manual intervention?

But in profile documents you can't store objects, only simple values!

@4 In my opinion the state of an agent shouldn't be changed by a design update. Personally I only use LotusScript agents only with one line of code calling a sub in a Script library, therefore the agents never change after creation. But this is a kind of "workaround".

@1: I don't see a difference, either.

@2: Which kind of "security reasons" do you see? You cannot overwrite constructors, nor destructors in LotusScript, therefore the initialization and wrap-up will be executed even for all subclasses. What else?

I know that the product classes (NotesDocument etc.) are implemented in C++ (or C?). But even then, why can't subclasses call it's superclass' methods and use their attributes. In this special case, it would be okay for me, if the private members aren't usable in the subclass.

@3 First using delegation means, you would have to implement methods for EACH PUBLIC method and attribute of NotesDocument in your Decorator. This is a lot of work, and for each new release of Notes/Domino, you would have to update your class.

Second, you can't use your class in places, where NotesDocument is allowed, can you? This would only be possible, if you could subclass NotesDocument.

@2 Ben, I understand that Jesper wants to iterate only through items with the SAME name. AFAIK these fields have some number determining their order.

Indeed, this is an editable Listbox field on a layout region.

Wouldn't it be faster to enter the date in these cases?

I don't like placing files for collaboration on file servers: Think about replication, local replicas, separate company locations, ... IMHO it's better to create a basic Notes application, where to store the files, and have a "Send Doc Link" action in there.

Not every application is for Notes client AND browser (and IMHO most are not).

The browsers only have a VERY limited amount of input elements, which are constructed to run in every browser, in every OS and in a HTTP environment (request-response-interaction).

The Notes client - like every "fat" client - has the CHANCE to use more, nicer, richer, and more effective elements. They can be build highly interactive (think of input translation and validation accessing "external" data that is information stored outside of the current document).

Would you really want to sacrifice this benefit for a minority of apps? I definitely not.

Apropos scale: How do you think should the list of "tuned out" conversations be stored? How would a entry of this list ever be removed? I think, depending on the environment, these lists could get VERY big. And having the feature, I fear, more people would get cc-ed, because they can tune out.

Oops, in the meantime, another idea was linked to this one.

See Add a 3-level oder 5-level promotion at { Link }

Finally, I demoted this idea in favor of Theo's idea with 5 (or 3) weighted vote options (see linked idea).

Too many sidebars... there is no space left... don't clutter the interface...

Perhaps if a Computed Text property could control its behavior?

And an option: fit content when printing (thus in the print-out always all entries were printed!)

Group calendars are a typical 3rd party product for Notes/Domino. Is there one on OpenNTF?

The problem I see with a corporate-wide (or Domain-wide) calendar is its scalability. Would really big companies (IBM, Daimler, ...) could have ONE common calendar.
And for which time-frame?

I would propose an approach with a template for group calendars with some kind of Domino add-in task for a performance boost. This way, the customer could decide, which group calendars he needs: company-level, department-level, team-level, all or only certain groups... And with individual time-frames for each calendar...

But a PostDocumentsDelete would be fine... :-)

Or you can use the Database Script.QueryDocumentsDelete event.

To obey the access restrictions on the view itself and its document, the servlet had to create a new connection for each user. Therefore not much of the performance benefit of the servlet (vs. the agent) would be left.

The servlet engine is deactivated as default.

Do you know openNTF?! ;-)

And if you'll come to Lotusphere, you could attend our session AD311: "Object Oriented Programming with LotusScript – Take It To the Next Level"
From the description:
... We'll show you how to build a flexible framework for OO development in LotusScript ...

Details: { Link }

@2 Craig:
You are right that some people wouldn't pay much time on careful considerations, but others would. But if someone always would promote with 5 stars, all his promotions would have the same weight.

I would give only 3 grade. This way, the "always the highest" voters wouldn't displace the result to much.

Every approach I can think of, which includes a restricted amount of some currency ($, points, stars), would mean a lot of administrative work for the workers:

If it would be a fixed amount - like Ben proposes - what should the user do, after he had spent all his $? He would have to redistribute already spent $. This would require him to decide, from which ideas he should take points away. I don't like the idea to browse to all ideas (probably 100 to 1000) I have voted on...

If I got a limited amount of $ every week or month, what should I do, when time is left, but no $? Redistribution again. Should be left over $ kept for the next interval? An idea posted in an time interval when few other ideas were posted (like 24. Dec - 31. Dec) could gather a lot more $ than when posted in a "rush hour" period. What with users just starting? When Idea Jam gets more and more popular, more users will vote. This would put more weight on new ideas to "historic" ones.

And finally, like Bruce (I believe) had stated: We have to make it as simple as possible for the users to vote - not harder!

This would be a real performance killer! That column formula can't access anything outside the current document is exactly for this reason. Opening a note is a quite expensive operation - expensive in this context means resource and time intensive.

What about multi-lingual databases? Which form should be used for the lookup when there is more than one form?

Personally, I nearly never use constant options, but keyword documents, which can be modified by (some) users. @AliasLookup could only be used for contant option lists.

First, it's just unnecessary overhead to write a container class to pass as parameter.

Second, this way you couldn't pass existing subs or functions or those of classes, you don't have control over.

Third, with Interfaces and multi-class inheritance missing in LotusScript, all classes containing methods you want to use as parameters MUST inherit from a common superclass and cannot inherit from another class. This is especially bad, because this (container class for function passing as arguments) is a technical aspect determining the class hierarchy for business classes.

Fourth, call-back functionality was just an example. Do you know functional programming? There is much more that can be done with functions as parameters.

You can write a quite descriptive field name with 32 chars already...

This is implemented in Notes/Domino 8.

See page 5 of ID218: Help Protect Yourself with New Security Features
in IBM Lotus Domino 8
{ Link }

If IBM would include a JavaScript framework, it would be outdated by far, when a Notes release comes out - rember the JVM versions! But being one or two Java versions behind is nothing in comparison with outdated JavaScript frameworks. Or would you voluntarily work with a JavaScript framework from 2005 now?

If IBM would chose a framework, they would probably decide for Dojo (because of OpenAjax).

You could even wish for ANYTHING useful of the Field object (like attributes for its value, parent, type, ...) ;-)

First, I strongly disagree that numbers are better then words. Like Axel (hi!) I use descriptive words for the state. Where exactly in serial or parallel workflows are numbers beneficial?

Second, how is your idea related to the Notes client? Or to the product IBM ships altogether? It's about custom application development?!

Yupp, done in Notes 8.

Perhaps you should change the Idea Space?!?

Think of staging: separation of development, test and production environments. How would you handle this?

Sorry, I forgot to mention: This script works when you can use ssh to connect to the server.

Do you know Daniel Nashed? Look at { Link } for some hints and email him to get a script to start the Domino server in a certain manner, thus you can "log onto the console" by
sudo invoke-rc.d rc_domino monitor
and a lot more.

There is a block of rooms reserved in the three main hotels for speakers, but it will be available for a speaker only after he submitted his presentation. :-)

I think, a field in the Configuration document - perhaps named "RFC822PhrasePattern" - would be better: It could contain a pattern for the phrase, which will be evaluated for each sender.

It could contain following placeholders:
%CN%
%DN%
%AltName%

For your case, the field contents could be
"My Company/IT - %CN%"

Your proposition requires, that in each and every Person document, the new field must be filled correctly. This adds to the process of creating new users. And you have to remember to change after a user's renaming!

Thomas
{ Link }

Hi Matt,

like the list of idea spaces, this would be a very short list of words. Momentarily, only "enhancement" is too generic to be useful.

And the names of idea spaces could calculated automatically.

Alternatively, show more tags.

Thomas

Hmm, there are lots of different diagrams in UML (class, state, interaction, ...), but I don't see which could be mapped to Forms or Views.

Second LotusScript: LS lacks some very important concept other OO languages implement (see my ideas tagged with OOP), e. g. interfaces and class members. I believe this limits the possible mappings from UML class diagrams to LS.

JavaScript is even more difficult to map, since it lacks the "class" concept. UML doesn't support prototypical inheritance AFAIK.

And last but not least, you can already use UML tools to model and automatically create you business classes in Java - forth and back. But this seems to be limited to the model layer, perhaps it could be extended to the controller, but I don't see how to do it for the presentation layer = forms & views.

Thomas Bahn
{ Link }

Do you remember the Notes R5 Private Edition? It wasn't very successful, was it? Why repeat what didn't work?

Ok, why did R5 PE bomb? In my opinion, Notes as POP3/SMTP mail client is not as good as the free alternatives, e. g. Mozilla Thunderbird, which is an excellent mail client, and superior to Notes in this task (Anti-SPAM, tagging).

What makes Notes/Domino a world class platform is everything beyond mail: replication, applications, rights management etc. Just giving away the Notes client does not make sense in my opinion. Either put at least the Domino Designer into the package, simplify installation and usage even more, spend time and money on documentation for the private end-user and marketing, or let it alone at all.

What would have more effect (in my opinion, again) is to support pupils and students, colleges and universities. Give away client and server at no cost for education, send IBM employees and partners into the universities to teach Notes/Domino, workflow, information and knowledge management, etc.

If notesViewEntry.IsTotal is True, the row contains a total or two or three...

What should the proposed notesViewEntry.GetTotal return, if there is more than one total column?

For what? And shorter ideas are perhaps never opened, but read in the view.

That's why we use a MVC (Model View Controller) framework. Validation is the job of the model class and concentrated in one method. This way, even agents could use the same validation code as web apps as Notes client apps.

@Randy: You are right, but this works only, if the Domino Designer is installed (as far as I remember), therefore this is not an option for "normal" users.

RichText is stored in data structures. In C/C++ it should be no problem to "serialize" these structures into byte stream and encode those streams in Base64.
For the import, the stream could be decoded and "deserialized".

If you store the RichText in the nsf file, exactly this must take place (without the encoding). Why should it be impossible for DXL?

I do not assume, they will ever get RichText into a DXL representation with nodes and attribute, but a Base64 byte stream...

This is a duplicate of my yesterday's proposal "List Members + Parameter Info for custom classes in LotusScript", but I must confess, it's title is handier.

Make this a dialog list to select "People only, Groups only, ..."

And what about a switch for "for ACL, for Mail, ..."?

Some views now use this behavior, thus they would break, if the behavior would change.

Second, since the totals could differ for all users, they could not be calculated on the server. The index for such views would have to be recalculated every time the view is opened.

It would be great, since the signature could be used by DWA, too.

Perhaps a warning dialog would suffice?

The ID file is one of the most important security feature of the Notes client!

I think, the Notes/Domino platform is superior in security to many, many other systems BECAUSE of the two factor authentication. This way, it's much more difficult to steal someone's identity. This is, why in high-security areas you not only use one factor (PIN, key or whatever), but at least two.

In Notes it's not enough to get the user name (publicly available in most systems) and the password (through watching, searching for "notes", social engineering), but you have to get access to the ID file, too, which should be protected by file system rights.

Second, the personal private key is stored in the ID file - as are secret encryption keys. If you "get rid" of the ID file or it is stored in a central place like the Domino directory, everybody, who gets access to the password has also access to these keys.

Therefore my vote can only be "Demote"!