How to Become an Early Riser
Fri, Mar 5th 2010 3:24a Marcus Foerster I made several attempts to get up early again in the last weeks, but never really made it. I wanted to continue what worked really well last year, getting up at 4:30 almost everyday. I really love the early hours: no distractions, time for yourself, getting a lot done, and, of course, just the magic of the time before sunrise. But having tried again, I just couldn't make myself stay up when the alarm clock went off anything before 7:00am.br /br /Since yesterday, I seem to be back on my old sched [read] Keywords: blogger
140
LotusScript function to compare the items of two documents
Wed, Mar 3rd 2010 9:21a Marcus Foerster I want to share a little LotusScript code that compares the items of two documents, and which can be used e.g. to compare conflict documents. br /br /The main function is "compareDocuments" which expects the two documents as parameters. br /Adjust the constant "LOGFILEPATH" for the filepath of the log output.br /br /The comparison goes step by step, from checking the existence in the other document, to the item types, to the item values.br /br /Why do I use lists of a class CL_ItemCompare? Becau [read] Keywords: lotusscript
blogger
102
PickListStrings - Something Unexpected
Wed, Mar 3rd 2010 4:24a Marcus Foerster If you look for the cause of an error, it's not always the obvious - like in this case: br /the following LotusScript function retrieves a Notes database filepath, a view name and title and prompt to show a picklist to the user, and display the user selection in a messagebox.br /br /div class="code"Function handlePicklistResult(dbFilepath As String, viewName As String, dlgTitle As String, dlgPrompt As String) As Variantbr / br / On Error Goto errorhandlerbr / br / Dim res As Variantbr / br / Dim [read] Keywords: lotusscript
notes
blogger
database
119
Formula-Agent and @Prompt
Tue, Mar 2nd 2010 5:28a Marcus Foerster I had to write a small maintenance agent to reset NotesItems, and, to not accidentally trigger it, I used the @Prompt function to ask the typical "Are you really sure?" question - not a good idea ;-) br /br /The result was, that I had to keep clicking message boxes until the agent was finally done - fortunately there where only 42 documents in the databases, which made me click 42 times. br /br /Here is why; I used the following agent, with the options "Action menu selection" and "All selected d [read] Keywords: agent
lotusscript
notes
blogger
database
116
LotusScript Quiz: the "+" operator
Mon, Mar 1st 2010 4:23a Marcus Foerster As you (if you are a LotusScript developer ;-)) know,br /br /- span style="font-family:courier"Msgbox "a" + 3/span results in a type mismatch error.br /- span style="font-family:courier"Msgbox "a" 3/span delivers span style="font-family:courier""a3"/span.br /br /Now, do you know what the result of this line of code is?br /br /div class="code"Msgbox "1" + 1br //divbr /br /A. span style="font-family:courier""11"/span.br /B. span style="font-family:courier"2/span.br /C. A type mismatch error occurs [read] Keywords: lotusscript
notes
blogger
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Build Smarter, Richer Notes/Domino Applications with Adobe Flex
Wed, Feb 24th 2010 4:23a Marcus Foerster Thomas Baumgartner and I wrote an article for the View about building smarter, richer Notes/Domino Applications with Adobe Flex, which just got published last Friday. br /br /The article can be viewed here: a href="http://www.eview.com/eview/VOLR6.nsf/CurrentIssue/030E73C0F786975C852576CF004329AE?OpenDocument" target="_blank"Domino/Flex integration/abr /br /In this article, we lead the reader through the first steps of building a Flex application, then connecting the Flex app with a Domino datab [read] Keywords: domino
notes
application
applications
blogger
database
integration
51
Winter Wonderland
Sun, Feb 7th 2010 10:30a Marcus Foerster Enjoying a wonderful day with my son at the "ski kindergarten" in Lenggries.br /br /centera href='http://www.flickr.com/photos/35372087@N02/4336814459/'img src='http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2762/4336814459_b7ef2d8cda_m.jpg' border='0' width='281' height='210' style='margin:5px'/a/centerbr /br /p class='blogpress_location'Position:a href='http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Lenggries,Deutschland%4047.663647%2C11.566421z=10'Lenggries,Deutschland/a/pdiv class="blogger-post-footer"[ a href="http://marcu [read] Keywords: blogger
google
44
Tech 2 Wear
Thu, Feb 4th 2010 2:28p Marcus Foerster p class="mobile-photo"a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_w66LeCW5e1o/S2sKVlQHn5I/AAAAAAAABEs/dST8HhFn8yk/s1600-h/Foto-798032.jpg"img src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_w66LeCW5e1o/S2sKVlQHn5I/AAAAAAAABEs/dST8HhFn8yk/s320/Foto-798032.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5434448741245886354" //a/pHow cool *g* :) just saw someone carrying this obviously selfmade briefcase - the grip is an old receiver from the times when the post office offered exactly one type of phone in three weird colors, and [read] Keywords: blogger
mobile
office
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1
Adobe Flex - helpful development resources
Wed, Feb 3rd 2010 8:27a Marcus Foerster Here's a list of links that are a great starting point if you want to learn Flex, and some like the style and component explorer still help me a lot during the development process. Just shared them via email and thought I might just share them here, too - sharing is good, right?br /br /Originally, these links were put together by a href="http://www.schaumibaumi.de/" target="_blank"Thomas Baumgartner/a - Thank you, Thomas :-)br /br /ullia href="http://flex.org/" target="_blank"Flex.org/abr /Flex. [read] Keywords: application
blogger
consulting
development
email
wiki
122
Import Lotusphere presentations into session database
Tue, Feb 2nd 2010 10:25a Marcus Foerster Have you downloaded the Lotusphere 2010 presentation files already and are you now switching between LS agenda and your file folder to find out what session id belongs to what session? br /Wouldn't it be nice to be able to browse through the sessions by day, speaker etc. and view the short descriptions together with the presentation files?br /br /Here is how you can do this:br /br /The guys at Genii Software offer their LS2010_SessionsDB for download with all the meta information for the Lotusph [read] Keywords: agent
lotusphere
lotusscript
blogger
database
javascript
linux
mac
server
17
Lotusphere 2010 Monday
Wed, Jan 27th 2010 10:56a Marcus Foerster It's been a pretty long time since my last blog post - I guess Lotusphere is just the right time to start again. So what's happening in Disney World? Weather is great, 70F, it's awesome to be here and see everyone again. Hey, where was everyone at JellyRoles yesterday night? :-)br /br /Today's big event was of course the Opening General Session of Lotusphere 2010. The guest speaker William Shatner was just pure brilliant - and everyone in the room very excited... geeks... ;-)br /br /What Bob Pic [read] Keywords: connections
ibm
lotus
lotusphere
notes
quickr
traveler
application
applications
blogger
google
javascript
I found the fail whale
Wed, May 6th 2009 2:45a Marcus Foerster During our vacation in Budapest, I found the fail whale on a playground of the local zoo. And, yes, from the trees came twittering...[ Post a comment ] [read] Keywords: blogger
37
Pitfall on NotesUiDocument vs. NotesDocument field changes - unexpected "Reload"
Wed, Apr 8th 2009 3:14a Marcus Foerster When mixing field changes in a NotesUiDocument and the corresponding NotesDocument, it is very important to make sure that they do not have any side-effects on each other. Could be ugly... To see what I mean, try this one: Build a simple form with one text field "myField" and a button. The button has the following code in the Click event: ' get NotesUiDocument Dim ws As New NotesUIWorkspace Dim uidoc As NotesUIDocument Set uidoc = ws.CurrentDocument ' first check the current content in the [read] Keywords: document
notes
blogger
6
Conference on Migration and Coexistence of IBM, Microsoft & Google Messaging Systems
Tue, Apr 7th 2009 8:53a Marcus Foerster My company, Pentos AG, will hold a great conference in November in Munich, the "COMpentos 2009 Migration & Coexistence". The conference will be all about migration and coexistence between the messaging systems from IBM, Microsoft and Google. There will be best practice (and others) sessions by experts like Kai Gutzeit, Head of Google Enterprise DACH, as well as the "COMpentos WorldCafé", where you can informally interchange about migration experiences. Check out the conference infopage, [read] Keywords: ibm
javascript
best practice
blogger
enterprise
google
microsoft
14
Coming home - Yes, I'm a GONAD
Mon, Apr 6th 2009 11:11p Marcus Foerster GONAD, Geeky Order of Notes Admins and Developers, has arrived at one of the most mysterious and sacred places on earth next to Stonehenge and the Easter Islands… Oktoberfest’s hometown Munich. Thank you, Brother Steve, for inducting me into the ancient, esteemed, and respected brother and sisterhood of GONAD. Only an Irishman understands to set up Bavaria as its own branch next to (Northern-)Germany. What about you? Are you a GONAD? Get entitled today The ceremony of induction is planned [read] Keywords: javascript
notes
blogger
5
Eeyore: It *was* engineers playing in production environment
Sun, Apr 5th 2009 4:39a Marcus Foerster (Referring to the last blog post: weird blog post entry appearing and disappearing) LOL - I knew it: Quote from blogger.com's knownissues-blog: >>Update: During routine testing, a bug caused a small number of FTP blogs to publish a test post. No systems or accounts were hacked. [read] Keywords: javascript
blogger
bug
9
Is Eeyore cute?
Sun, Apr 5th 2009 4:38a Marcus Foerster Yes he is; what is not so cute though is, that I found this blog entry this morning on my blog - and I hadn't written it: "eeyore is cute!" Thinking my account might have been hacked (thanks for treating it good), I started changing my password; while at it, I searched for that line in Google, and guess what: plenty of entries, all from bloggers that use Googles Blogger.com... (this site has an example summary: www.nationalcenter.org/...) Seems like an engineer had played a little - updating [read] Keywords: javascript
blogger
google
password
8
Dim in LotusScript: Common mistake
Fri, Apr 3rd 2009 2:32a Marcus Foerster If you need to dimension two Integer variables i and j, then in some programming languages you can do it this way: Dim i, j As Integer Don't do this in LotusScript, it won't work (well, it will, but not in a good way). Try the following code snippet yourself to see what Notes does here: Dim i, j As Integer Msgbox "Type of i: " & Typename(i) & Chr$(13) & "Type of j: " & Typename(j) You will receive: Notes doesn't assign a type to i (notice: NOT a bug, just different interpr [read] Keywords: lotusscript
notes
blogger
bug
3
Keep on running...
Thu, Apr 2nd 2009 3:15a Marcus Foerster Time's been a little bit short this week, so I'm a few days late in posting this, but I still wanted to share this great moment for me. And at the end, there is even a great lesson to learn ;-) We have an apartment that is set up in a way where you can go around in a circle (well, more in a square ;-)). Great for kids and especially my 3-year-old son, who loves running around there every night (if you want to tire out your kids before they go to bed, get an apartment like this). Just for giggle [read] Keywords: blogger
3
Why cells sometimes cannot be merged in Notes Designer
Fri, Mar 27th 2009 8:39a Marcus Foerster Have you ever been wondering, why sometimes you cannot merge cells in Notes Designer? Two cells are selected, you want to merge them, but the menu item is grayed out? If this happens, you probably have set the properties of at least one of the cells to "Fixed width". Just uncheck the option in both cells, and you will be able to merge the cells. Ten years of Notes experience, and a colleague had to tell me that today... doh...[ Post a comment ] [read] Keywords: designer
notes
blogger
properties
How to speed up loading your NotesViews in LotusScript
Tue, Mar 24th 2009 5:33p Marcus Foerster One of the things that can really slow down your NotesAgents is opening large NotesViews. When coding an agent, it is important to always check if the agent redundantly opens the same NotesView and if access time could be reduced. I do this with a short but handy function that I want to share here: %REM Accesses a view and stores it in listView; only opens the view, if the view does not already exist in listView Input: - viewname: name of view to be accessed - listView: list of NotesViews, can [read] Keywords: agent
lotusscript
blogger
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How to print a computed footer on a Lotus Notes document
Thu, Mar 19th 2009 7:45p Marcus Foerster Recently I was asked to make a print form in Lotus Notes (R7), that required certain things you would normally rather do with a word processor (and yes, phase II includes exporting it to Symphony ;-)). One of these things was a variable, computed footer (a dblookup from a parameter). Now Notes knows footers and Notes knows computed values, but it doesn't know computed values *in* a footer. Placing a computed value at the end of the form (there already, how would you define the end?) didn't help [read] Keywords: dblookup
document
dxl
formula
lotus
notes
R7
symphony
blogger
3
10 steps to become the "Three Wise Monkey Sales Person of the Month - no see, no hear, just speak"
Tue, Mar 17th 2009 1:29p Marcus Foerster Some while ago I planned a certification and was looking for a new company that would do the test. I got reminded of this slightly confusing experience by Gabriella Davis' blog entry about Dell and their "personal account managers". The test provider, where I did my certification, tried selling me IT trainings for my company that had nothing to do with our business at all, and accomplished the balancing act of being over-eager and not-caring at the same time. From this experience, I created the [read] Keywords: javascript
blogger
7
Quicktip: @Trim in JavaScript
Tue, Mar 17th 2009 8:15a Marcus Foerster Just needed this one - thought you might find it helpful as well, so I am blogging it: If you need to simulate @Trim (formula) / fulltrim (Lotusscript) in JavaScript (string-only), you can do so with the following function using regular expressions: function trim(txt) { return txt.replace(/(^ +| +$)/g,'').replace(/ +/g, ' '); }[ Post a comment ] [read] Keywords: formula
javascript
lotusscript
blogger
blogging
Forgotten Notes Features: GetThreadInfo()
Sun, Mar 15th 2009 6:16p Marcus Foerster When reviewing LotusScript code, every other time I find the following lines of code for errorhandling: errHandler: msgbox "An error occured in procedure 'myProcedure' in line " & erl & ": " & error (replace "msgbox" by "doLog()" or whatever way of logging you prefer / do). And in each other procedure, the name of the procedure is hardcoded in the errorhandler again. Well, while LotusScript might not have the best error tracing features, it does give you at least some dynamic syste [read] Keywords: lotusscript
notes
blogger
community
10
The error that wasn't an error
Sat, Mar 14th 2009 5:00p Marcus Foerster At a customer site I got asked to check an error that occured in the activity form of a Notes database. The database was a ticket database where IT service could track service requests and bug reports. Requestor said, they did not know where the error came from, but they sent a screenshot, where they had marked in red, where the error showed: I ran a code search on the database first, lookig for the error string, in order to find out what procedure had written that error. Search result was ze [read] Keywords: document
notes
blogger
bug
database
6
Yahoo Pipes - "Rewire the Web"
Fri, Mar 13th 2009 6:24p Marcus Foerster I just discovered an old link that lead me to the Yahoo Pipes Site. Quote from this website: About Pipes Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web. Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs: combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it. geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map. power widgets/badges on your web site. grab the out [read] Keywords: javascript
mashup
blogger
widgets
RSS-Feed not working :-(
Fri, Mar 13th 2009 3:39a Marcus Foerster Unfortunatly my RSS feed is currently not working (generates an empty file). Don't know, when I will have time to fix it, will let you know. Funny thing is, you won't receive this message when reading my blog through an RSS reader... or, if you receive it, it will already work again... oh, a paradoxon, how nice :-)[ Post a comment ] [read] Keywords: blogger
Quicktip: Pitfall with GetItemValue in LotusScript
Thu, Mar 12th 2009 5:02p Marcus Foerster I still often see code like 'NotesDocument.form(0)' in LotusScript agents to access the value of a NotesItem. When the item name and the purpose of the item is not as clear as on "form", I prefer using 'NotesDocument.GetItemValue("form")(0)'. This seems to be the safe way to go, as you will always receive a valid return value; no need to check, if the item is available - the only thing you have to consider is the type of the item, i.e. will you receive e.g. a String or a Double. At least it see [read] Keywords: document
lotusscript
blogger
3
"Twitter out of capacity"
Wed, Mar 11th 2009 2:09a Marcus Foerster Receiving this message a lot lately. Anyone knows, if they're working on it? Guess there's going to come a lot more users in the future...[ Post a comment ] [read] Keywords: blogger
twitter
