Rewriting URL in Domino using DSAPI

I will briefly describe what we were aiming to achieve. In order to open page with parameters Domino requires to add ?open or ?opendocument action and only after that Domino allows to add parameters. It's quite annoying for us due to some integration with another systems, those systems expect they can simply add parameters just after our pages, i.e.: http://www.host/page?parameter=123 etc. Also important reason - we simply do not like this ?open or ?opendocument in URL.

we want to be able to that:
www.host/page?opendocument&parameter=123 ==> www.host/page?parameter=123

I got couple helpful comments in my previous article about URL control in Domino, that helped me to look on different solutions, thanks guys. However I decided that those solutions a bit complicated to setup and they could do some impact on page load time.

I've been working on DSAPI solution last days and finally with some help I've made it! Now we have full control with our URLs, at least I've such feeling :). Let me share my small success to all of you.

Here you can find main steps you need to do. Please keep in mind, I've updated my code a bit as our logic has many rules when exactly to add parameters.

1. Enable flag to catch Rewrite URL event.

filterInitData->eventFlags = kFilterRewriteURL;

2. Link 'rewrite URL' event with you function.

DLLEXPORT unsigned int HttpFilterProc(FilterContext* context, unsigned int eventType, void* eventData) {
 switch (eventType) {
  case kFilterRewriteURL:
   return RewriteURL(context, (FilterMapURL *) eventData);
  default:
   return kFilterNotHandled;
 }
}

3. Finally the main logic, that makes URL rewriting.

int RewriteURL(FilterContext* context, FilterMapURL* pEventData) {
 FilterParsedRequestLine pReqData;
 unsigned int errid=0;

 // if there are no parameters in URL - nothing to do.
 if (strstr(pEventData->url, "?")==NULL) return kFilterNotHandled;
 // read request as we are going to update query.
 context->ServerSupport(context, kGetParsedRequest, &pReqData, NULL, NULL, &errid);
 // if query starts from opendocument - nothing to do
 if (strncmp(pReqData.pQueryUri, "opendocument", strlen("opendocument"))==0) return kFilterNotHandled;
 // adding opendocument before query and put result in pEventData->pathBuffer
 sprintf(pEventData->pathBuffer, "%s?opendocument&%s", pReqData.pPathUri, pReqData.pQueryUri);

 return kFilterHandledEvent;
}

Solution we did works like a charm and what is very important it does not affect page load time (we measured of course)

Related topics
DSAPI for Domino
Solution for Lotus Domino to the trailing slash problem
Replacement for DSAPI in Java/XPages

Mongodb - Enable Authentication

Basically it is very easy to do,

• 1. open mongodb shell
• 2. open admin db and add admin user (you need to have 1 user otherwise you can' lose access to your databases at all)

use admin
db.addUser("admin","12345")

• 3. Enable authentication auth=true (simply un-comment it) in config file 'sudo vi /etc/mongodb.conf', save changes and restart mongodb service

sudo service mongodb restart

For more information please read Security Practices and Management

Fighting for control of URL in Domino

We have really annoying problem for years with our URLs on all websites based on Domino. We use classic approach because we want control all tags + we like jQuery more etc. Our problem is about mandatory action [?open | ?opendocument] for pages with parameters, so if you want to add parameters to your page (i.e. param1=123) you have to add [?open | ?opendocument] just after your URL and only then you are allowed to add parameters.

Not really a huge problem, however we want to use new tracking code from google. That tracking has problems with [?open | ?opendocument]: it does not work correctly in case if first parameter is ?open. So now its blocker for us and we want to fix it for all another cases as well. We want to have possibility get rid off ?open | ?opendocument

Question in few words: "is it possible to get this URL working?"
http://www.e-conomic.com/accountingsoftware?parameter=123
instead of this
http://www.e-conomic.com/accountingsoftware?open&parameter=123

We've tried redirect, substitutions - no success ofc :(.

Next in my queue is DSAPI and I'm sure it can solve that problem (at least from documentation) however I'm not able to do that due to my experience with DSAPI and very very low information in the web.

I've played with different events in DSAPI: kFilterStartRequest, kFilterRawRequest and kFilterRewriteURL and tried to change incoming URL from request but did not success with it. Does any of you guys can give me tips :) what I do wrong or maybe there is another solution how to achieve that quest?

Nodejs and compression of HTML, JS, CSS

To decrease loading time for pages, it is always nice to minify your HTML, CSS and JS. Also to decrease number of requests we inject our minified CSS/JS directly on our pages (ofc we will do that unless our CSS/JS have small size), so minus 2 requests to all pages.

Now time to write couple lines of real code

1. UglifyJS - compress JS

var uglifyJS = require("uglify-js");

var result = uglifyJS.minify("filename.js");
console.log(result.code);

2. Sqwish - compress CSS

var sqwish = require('sqwish');
var filename=app.get('filename.css');
fs.readFile(filename, 'utf8', function(err, data) {
    if (err) throw err;
    var minifiedCss = sqwish.minify(data)
    console.log(minifiedCss);
})

3. HTMLMinifier - compress HTML

var htmlminifier = require('html-minifier');
var minifiedHTML = htmlminifier.minify(data, {
 removeComments: true,
 removeCommentsFromCDATA: true,
 collapseWhitespace: true,
 collapseBooleanAttributes: true,
 removeAttributeQuotes: true,
 removeEmptyAttributes: true
});

So at the result we decreased size of our pages a lot and also decreased number of requests which is also nice, we all love "fast pages".

Node.js first experience and first simple project

From 2013 I've started to learn (as much as I've free time) Node.js. 'Domino/Notes' still my main, however it is always nice to learn something new.

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast,
scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model 
that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time 
applications that run across distributed devices.

Together with Andrew Kuba (who guide me how to 'node') we are doing simple website for one game which is very popular right now, we are aiming to have hundreds users/month :) at some points + it is always nice to do something that is real and online
We are using only couple modules for our first application:

• Express - minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.
• Underscore is a utility-belt library for JavaScript that provides a lot of the functional programming support that you would expect in Prototype.js (or Ruby), but without extending any of the built-in JavaScript objects
• mustache is a logic-less templates.
• yuicompressor compressor to minify our JS/CSS (we do compress all our CSS/JS and put it directly on page to avoid additional lookups)
• html-minifier compressor to minify our HTML

We do not use database right now, however we are planning to use mongodb with mongoose in near future.

Pick LoL is our website (first version) we are working on to get some experience with Node.js

During next couple months I will write more posts about node.js which I'm going to like hopefully :).