8.5.2 XPages Allows You To Specify A Media Type For CSS Files

Posted on July 12, 2010 by qtzar

IBM Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5.2 is still in
beta, All features referenced in this blog post may or may not appear in
the final version of 8.5.2.

If you attended the Lotusphere session
‘Make Your XPages Applications POP with CSS And Themes’ given by myself
and David Leedy one of the things we mentioned was that in Domino 8.5.1
and lower there was no way to specify the media type for a CSS file that
was added directly to an XPage or added via a theme document.

The great news is that is the latest
8.5.2 code drop that I’m using ( code drop 5 for anybody else who might
be on the managed beta ) has been updated so that you can now specify the
media type in either location.

When adding a Style Sheet directly to
an XPage you will have to go to the ‘All Properties’ section for the page
and then expand out the ‘Resources’ and ‘StyleSheet’ sections to find the
media property. It’s a nice handy dropdown list. This may get updated in
later builds to expose the property in the helper dialog box that appears
when you initially add the style sheet.

A picture named M2

If you prefer to use theme documents
rather the add style sheets directly to an XPage you can specify the media
type by adding the tags for it like this :

A picture named M3

This is especially great news for anybody
who is using the BluePrint framework as that framework comes with a print.css
file but you should consider setting up a printing CSS file for any apps
that you are building. The most common use for a print.css file would be
to use it to hide parts of the page that don’t need printing. For example
on a wiki app you could hide the sidebar so that the end user who prints
the page just gets the raw content. Who needs a tag cloud on a printout.

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Automatically Install The iPhone iOS4 Timeout Patch When You Install Traveler

Posted on June 30, 2010 by qtzar

If your running the new iPhone operating
system iOS4 and your also running IBM Lotus Traveler then you may have
heard about a timing issue that can slow down the syncing of eMails to
the device and even cause some server issues.

Apple has now created a support
document that details the problem
and they also provide a patch in the form of a ‘Mobile Configuration Profile’
that you can install onto your iPhone so that the default timeout is set
back to 240 seconds, as it was in iOS3.

For your current Traveler users you
can just point them to this support document and get them to install the
profile and restart their phones but for new Traveler users heres a little
trick that you can use so that you won’t have to remember to also install
the second profile.

The .mobileconfig file that you download
form the Apple website is just an XML file that you can open in any text
editor. Download the file you your computer and open it up and you will
see an <array> section containing a <dict> section that contains
a load of keys and values that define the timeout settings.

Now go to your Traveler server and open
the apple.xml file ( it’s in the datatravelercfgclient folder ) and
you’ll notice that it is also an XML file that contains an <array>
section with a couple of <dict> sections. Now all you have to do
it copy the patch’s <dict> section, including the <dict> and
</dict>, into the array section of your apple.xml file and save it.

Now when a new user installs Traveler
on their device the profile that downloads from the Traveler server will
include both the ActiveSync setting and the timeout settings. All the user
has to do is restart the iPhone for the timeout settings to take effect.

Hope this helps somebody…

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Multiple Lotus Traveler Accounts on iPhone? Watch Out…

Posted on June 23, 2010 by qtzar

Now that the new iPhone operating system
( iOS 4 ) supports multiple ActiveSync accounts you may be tempted to point
to more then one IBM Lotus Traveler, for example your corporate Lotus Traveler
server and the one on the Lotus Greenhouse.

If you try this you may end up scratching
your head as the second Lotus Traveler Profile on the iPhone overwrites
the first Lotus Traveler Profile, more head scratching will ensue if you
reinstall the first profile only to find the second profile has now been
overwritten.

The reason that this happens is all
down to the template profile that IBM Lotus Traveler uses on all installs
of the IBM Lotus Traveler server. The unique profile identifier is the
exact same on all servers and the iPhone iOS4 sees the two profiles coming
from two different servers as the same profile.

Fixing the problem will involve the
server administrator, they will need to either manually edit the template
profile ( travelercfgapple.xml ) to change the profile identifier string
or they can build a new template profile using the Apple
iPhone Configuration Tool. Once
the apple.xml file is replaced with a new one with a different profile
identifier string there is no need to restart the server, just go to your
Lotus Traveler server from the iPhone and you’ll now be able to pickup
the new Lotus Traveler profile and install it alongside the other Lotus
Traveler Profile.

Hope this helps somebody, having more
then one Lotus Traveler server is not typical for end users.

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Xpages Is About To Get A Lot More Powerful

Posted on June 6, 2010 by qtzar

IBM Lotus Notes/Domino 8.5.2 is still in
beta, All features referenced in this blog post may or may not appear in
the final version of 8.5.2.

Over on the Domino Designer Wiki a number
draft documents have been released that explain the newXpages Extensibility
API’s that should be available in 8.5.2. As a member of the
managed beta for 8.5.2 I’ve had the chance to try out some of the concepts
presented in the documents and all I can say is that WOW, Xpages just got
a whole lot more powerful.

In my simple tests I have created a
number of new container-type controls to mimic some of the HTML5 elements
and as you can see from the screen snippit below when I add my new controls
to an XPage it adds the the namespace ( xmlns: ) and my new tags are all
prefaced with ‘h5’ as defined per the documentation.

Page Source :

A picture named M2

Rendered HTML :

A picture named M3

So why are XPage now a lot more powerful?
Well if you read the documentation you’ll see that it’s now possible for
third-party developers to create a pre-compiled library of controls that
can be deployed to a Domino Server or Notes Client. These libraries may
be simple controls that add new HTML elements like the ones above for HTML5,
allowing you to write HTML5 designed applications before IBM add HTML5
support directly to XPages or they could be more complex controls like
the ones that are available from third-parties for the ASP.NET development
environment.

Expect to see Business Partners selling
new XPages Controls libraries and for free libraries to appear on OpenNTF
once 8.5.2 is released.

The documentation for this new feature
is still missing a few parts which hopefully will be filled in by the time
8.5.2 comes out but based on what is available so far this looks like an
amazing new feature in XPages.

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