Approach to fill word/excel documents without Office installed

I've had task where we need to fill our word/excel templates with data from notes documents on Server and get URL to users (our application for web uses only). All users have Office installed but Domino server does not have (and will not have installed it).

So after some research I decided to use the most simple way from my point of view.

Idea is next -> put predefined text (f.x. ##fieldName1##, ##fieldName2##) on word/excel documents and then save them as XML. I did not use bookmark because it is impossible (at least looks like impossible) to process them in XML.

So what do we have at this point? Document saved as XML with predefined text on it.
Then when we need to fill and show document to user we just take our XML template, take all content from it and do many replaces (we replace predefined text on our data from notes document), then don't forget to remove all predefined text that were not filled by some reasons, and then important point print it for web user like this:

Print {Content-Type:application/msword}
Print {Cache-Control: public, must-revalidate}
Print {Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT}
Print xml_output

8.5.1. FP1 found problem during installation. Error: version mismatch. Expected to find version "20090929.1223", found version(s): "20091002.1006".

I've tried to update Lotus Notes 8.5.1 on different PC and got problem

Error: version mismatch. Expected to find version "20090929.1223", found version(s): "20091002.1006".

I did not find the reason why I had older version then 20090929.1223 but I found one post on IBM with similar issue.

So, let me show how I avoided it, I unpacked installation to my PC, went to ..\deploy\hotfix folder and changed one variable in file fix.ini -> ForVersion=20091002.1006 (you can add some text to about lotus dialog if you change some another variables).

When you finish it, run setup.exe from root directory, it should installed then correctly.

p.s. Do it on your won risk, I'm not sure that it will not do some affects of LN :-)

How to check all content-type values?

I have some tasks where I have to open xml document in related application, so I had to know the content type values. I did not know that it could be checked in regedit :-)

so here is a way how we can look at it

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT \ Mime \ Database \ Content Type \

f.x. for excel it will be like this

Print {Content-Type:application/vnd.ms-excel}
Print {Cache-Control: public, must-revalidate}
Print {Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT}
Print xml_output

got Lotus Notes 8.5.1 FP1 installed ! who will be last ? :)

There are many fixes in that fix pack, so will see how it works :-)

Open XFDF file in Browser using Abobe Reader

I was facing with one simple problem. I had XFDF file on our web suite. Users open that XFDF file as URL (http://database/view/doc/$File/fileName) but it did not open in Adobe Reader, but in Browser as XML. I looked around and found solution. Add these line before XFDF output and it will start to work.

Print {Content-Type:application/vnd.adobe.xfdf}
Print {Cache-Control: public, must-revalidate}
Print {Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT}
Print xml_output

How to open XFDF file from IE in Adobe Reader?

I have really interesting problem. I have posted XFDF file on my site and planning that user will click on it and get PDF file opened. But the strange this is that each browser has different behavior:

on my PC I have set associated application for xfdf file - Adobe Reader.
1) IE opens my xfdf file in XML format, and that's all. that's the biggest pain,
2) FF opens it in good way, but anywhere it ask which application to use when open xfdf file.
3) Chrome, just download files without anything.

Any ideas? :) I will update my post later if I solve the problem

iText announced new version of their product 5

I use iText library in some of my LN applications, so I check their site sometimes for updates. Today I found that they announced new version - iText 5 (last one was 2.1.7).
I tried to update my code with that library, but I had to do some changes before, because new library has some changes in naming.

Anywhere it is really good that iText did not stop and moving forward, that's cool. Good job

Way to show FLV into you web pages

If you want to show SWF/FLV files onto you pages I would propose to use swfobject.js library. It's free and open. Here is a link to their site.

Here is an example of code how to do this


Let me do some comments for new people.

1) First of all I have to say that I used 1.5 version of swfobject instead of last one swfobject2.2. I'm planning to update it to 2.2 very soon. So please use 2.2 instead of 1.5, but anywhere approach is very similar.

- as you see DIV with ID FLV is used to be replaced with code that swfobject will generate to show SWF/FLV video.
- preview.swf is a player use want to use to show FLV video.
- your.flv is a FLV file you want to show.