Wednesday, January 19, 2011

trying to get full control over xPage auto generated html

I know xPage is great especially for RAD but I feel bad when I see how Domino generates HTML for xPage's application and dojo why it loads even if I do not want to use it? yea, I know that most of xPage's controls use it but anywhere I want to keep control over each html-tag. I want nice html. I want to know what is going on with my html. I'm sure all of you saw what html we get from xPage, and I want to repeat once again "I'm not fan of that".
Here are couple steps for those who want to get some more control over xPage. I will show example with new application that has only one xPage.

so let's start. we created new application and created new xPage, let's call it 'index'. Open it in browser. what do you see? My Domino generates already lot of staff.

1. included dojo.
2. included css.
3. created form and put there ~6 fields for some reasons. I do not know why.
4. html, head, title, body tags and !DOCTYPE

So instead to display empty page, Domino generated ~1Kb of some data we did not ask.

1-st step: disable default dojo in xPage.
You can disable the loading of the default Dojo, for example in order to use a more recent version of Dojo. In the Package Explorer in Domino Designer open your database and find the WebContent/WEB-INF/xp.properties file.
Edit the file and addxsp.client.script.libraries=none
Switch to Java perspective and Package Explorer there by default, so go there and make update. Save and check results. 2 line disappeared.

2-nd step: disable CSS.
create new Theme and remove extends="webstandard" and add this Theme in application properties as one we want to use. check hmtl source again - 3 lines with css went out.

open our index xPage and go to properties, tab Basic and set CreateForm = false. Save. Check. 
nice! we are quite near :)

4-th step. get empty blank xPage.
I do not know yet the way how correctly suppress rest of these tags and how to change doctype, so next time when I found solution I will update article.

Funny, while I was looking for solution for 4-th step, I found absolutely similar article from Chris, so you can read more older one This is an xPage.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Google Maps API - MarkerClusterer

If you ever did some job linked with google map (f.x. show markers with popup) you probably noticed problem with huge amount of markers (f.x.1000 markers). It does slow performance of webpage + it looks not very nice on UI (just mass of markers on same place). There is solution for such situation: MurkerClusterer, it allows to join markers into cluster with possibility to have different cluster on different zoom.
Here is an article about it - markerClusterer solution to the Too Many Markers problem
For those who works with Google Maps API this article is mandatory to read.

short dojo + ajax example how to get data from db

There are 3 most useful ahax-approaches I use when working with Lotus Domino:
- getting view as JSON. database.nsf/viewname?readviewentries& OutputFormat=JSON (fast and modern)

- agent approach (example here, most flexible and probably most slow approach)
- page/form/view as elelemnts, f.x. database.nsf/myform?openform&unid=123123 (easy to use but not  flexible, I use it very rarely)

Very small and known example of dojo's ajax, I'm getting some information from agent and then will use it in my JS later.

var jsondata;
dojo.xhrGet({
url: "database/agentGetData?Openagent&param1=id1",
sync: true,
load: function(data) {
jsondata = data;
}
});

I'm interesting in any another 'smart' approaches, so if u have some interesting idea we can discuss in comments them.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

nice command lotus\notes\nsd.exe -kill

Previously I've used kman.exe utilites to kill lotus notes processes, but now switch to this command.