Learning XPages Part 1 : Application Objectives

Welcome to the first in a series of blog
entries on learning XPages to develop a simple application. In each part
of this series of blog entries we will build, from scratch, a XPages based
phonebook application with the resulting application being released on
OpenNTF once it is complete. As I’m still learning XPages myself this should
be a fascinating exploration into the capabilities of XPages and should
help both myself and you, my readers, to get over the learning curve that
is involved in learning XPages in Lotus Domino 8.5.

Building a phonebook application is
probably one of the easiest applications you can create and phonebook applications
can be found in many companies as part of their intranet in one form or
another. For the purpose of this blog series I’ll be keeping the application
simple at first and then as the application progresses we can adding some
advanced features. Lets have a look at some of the objectives that I’ve
set for the application.

Xpages OneUI.

The base layout and look and feel is
going to use the OneUI CSS that IBM has developed. This is the same look
and feel that is used in the OpenNTF XPages Wiki application by Steve Castledine
and is also similar to the look and feel that the Discussion template in
8.5 uses. I have been told that the discussion template may even be moving
to the OneUI CSS in the 8.5.1 release but that remains to be seen. By using
this OneUI we can quickly set a predefined look for the application and
not have to worry about too much additional CSS.

Locations and People.

There will be two main data sources,
the first being a ‘location’ document that stores the main contact information
for an office, the office address, main fax number etc. and the second
will be a ‘person’ document that will contain all the information about
an individual person. The person document will also contain a field which
specifies which location the person belongs to.

Editable profiles.

When a user is logged in they should
have the ability to edit their own person document so that they can update
their details. This could be linked to a configuration setting so that
the application owner can disable this ability.

Notes client interface.

The notes client interface will be developed
using the Java Views to provide a similar look and feel to the Xpages Wiki
template. This will probably be the last thing that will be done to the
application as the main interface will be the XPages part.

Domino Addressbook Sync Agent.

Finally we’ll look at creating an agent
that will keep the phonebook up-to-date with the names found in the Domino
Directory. Again this will be done in the final stages as we’ll mainly
be concentrating on the XPages parts.

So there you have it, a rough plan for
the objectives of the XPages phonebook application. In the next part of
this series we’ll look at creating the initial OneUI layout in XPages and
then after that we’ll adding the data sources to the Xpages and linking
them all together.